Rumbled!

My wife asked me a question last night. ‘What are you doing?’ she said as I tapped away at the keyboard on my laptop.

Having learned before now that ‘Nothing’ would at best be an inadequate answer, or at worst would invoke the Spanish Inquisition because I am clearly up to no good, I answered truthfully, ‘I’m just… messing about with a blog.’

Something in my tone must have conveyed the subliminal message, ‘Mind your own business,’ or, perhaps, ‘Don’t pursue this line of questioning because you won’t approve,’ because getting on for a whole half-hour passed before the conversation resumed.

‘What are you doing?’ this time a little tetchily, her tone conveying, ‘You’re doing something stupid and I want to know what it is.’

‘I’m investigating what blogging is about and how it works.’ I really must work on my tone and try to eliminate the little-boy-caught-with- fingers-in-the-cookie-jar edge that it has to it when under interrogation.

‘But what are you doing? What are you writing in it?’

‘You can do anything you like with blogs. You can write anything you like.’ At this point I am corkscrewing like a Lancaster Bomber caught in a searchlight, deploying all the evasive skills I can muster. Why? I don’t know. It’s a free world, and there’s nothing wrong with writing a blog but, for some reason, I feel like the child whose mother has just discovered his secret stash of Woodbines in the locked box under his bed: annoyed but deeply chagrined.

‘What are you writing in it?’

Clearly I have had to bail out and have been caught by the Gestapo.

‘Well, a poem,’ and the sheepishness in my tone betrays that my evasive skills have evaded me, leaving me with no option but to blurt out the truth.

‘You mean, you put a poem out in cyberspace and hope that someone will read it?’ she fired at me, and I felt the barb of the question tugging at and embedding itself into my metaphorical flesh, and my mind registered subliminally her use of the word ‘cyberspace’.

‘Well… Yes.’

A silence followed that was exactly the right length to render the next remark completely un-rebuttable.

‘You’re weird.’

I looked round, just in time to see the shaking of her head and the sometimes-I-despair-of-you frown on the face of my beloved.

After what I considered a sufficient passage of time enough to convey, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m doing it anyway,’ I closed down the computer – a tacit admission of defeat.

For goodness sake, she watches ‘Eastenders'!