The seasons in England are wonderful. One minute you are shivering in a wet park amongst the wind blown daffodils – coat zipped up to your chin. The next everyone is wandering amongst the blossom in flip flops and t shirts. The weather has been weirdly hot on some days. Flying back from Ireland (where the temperature never rises above 15C) at the end of the Easter break, we found ourselves on a hot coach and then a desperately overcrowded train to get home where there was neither air conditioning nor openable windows. Women fanned themselves pathetically with scraps of paper and a baby started to overheat dangerously. Of course nobody complained. Except me that is. I am now funding every other train journey with train vouchers from the customer complaints department of First Great Western.
That was a few weeks ago. Now it’s the 2nd of May but it already feels like midsummer. Young ladies are walking around wearing embarrassingly skimpy scraps of denim called ‘miniskirts’ and showing off sunburnt legs. I think ten years in the Middle East has sharpened by pornographic skills to tremendous levels. People in this country are WALKING AROUND IN THEIR UNDERWEAR! I need to invest in some prayer beads and grow my beard a little longer.
Unfortunately, everyone is in flip flops. Only a few people have nice enough toes to wear flip flops. I was embarrassed wearing them by the pool in Al Ain. Isobel still misses Al Ain, but it’s more along the lines of, ‘Why is my bedroom smaller than the bathroom in my old bedroom?’ By the way, that was the bedroom with thousands of huge electronic gadgets and toys made in sweat shops in China (brought by 'Father Christmas' and her friend’s harassed parents on her birthdays) as opposed to the bedroom where you literally can’t fit a full length bed in the room and has a cereal-box sized collection of cheap trinkets and small plastic dolls.
Oh yes and Isobel also wonders ‘Why is the pavement cool enough to walk on with bare feet?’ and more urgently ‘Where the hell is Primrose?’ Primrose is well but from the letters we get very keen to get out of Sri Lanka which sounds pretty scary around Trincomalee and back to the UAE to slave for another bunch of SPOILED BRATS. Oh, Isobel shall I iron your socks for you? Pah! As the ‘househusband’ round here I am all for the reintroduction of child labour in the local mines. Primrose is missed and I particularly kick myself for not videoing her making those amazing curries to find out her secrets. She told me a hundred times but I got as far as coconut powder something something and then my eyes glazed over and I turned into Homer Simpson smelling the food and unable to think clearly. Certainly my Asda cook in sauce curries just don’t compare.
Anything else? I bet you have all booked your holidays by now. Where to this year? Let me think…. Turkey, Australia, Argentina, Kenya, Switzerland? Oh I know, how about Staines’s famous Thorpe Park for an afternoon! No, fortunately that experience awaits other materially and spiritually ravaged Brits. We’re going back to the French ruin in progress in August thank God. We still have a few bourgeois pretensions to hang on there at least. When you lot come next summer you have to stock the cavernous concrete pit under the house with vintage wines. That way we can hitchhike down to France and live off bread, goats cheese and fine wines for a month, instead of scrabbling around for money behind the sofa to buy a 2.10 bottle of Spanish ‘table wine’ at Tesco. It's got so bad we even prostituted ourselves and our children, and our dogs, to advertise Winalot for 150 quid. If you don't believe me buy the June edition of Eve magazine and gaze on how how low we have fallen. Incidentally, the dogs have never had anything so luxurious as Winalot in their lives.
I'm not really being fair, it is utterly gorgeous here right now and we're not really that broke because Sarah is on full time hours! Whoohoo! She's knackered and I hardly see her but there is food on the table again. Furthermore my studies are going a treat. After a slightly worrying week when my tutors were muttering about scaring the pensioners of Bournemouth with my wild eyed political ravings and ultra-violent clips from current affairs coverage of Iraq at a lecture at a sleepy local hotel, they seem pacified by my written ‘initial review’ and I’m through to the next stage. This just shows that I have buckled to naked coercion and have made myself complicit in the very process of hegemonic compromise that I am describing. Doh!
Workers of the world unite!
Dave Spart
Collective of Househusbands and Forty Something Students (Westwood Branch)
Write with the news! xxx
The seasons in 
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