How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints), Kathy Lette [books to read to increase intelligence .txt] 📗

doggy position – ‘where he begs, and I just roll over and play dead’, but I hadn’t admitted to myself that it was actually true. As Rory climbed aboard and pounded away at me as if I was his latest bit of DIY, I made a mental list of all the excuses I’d concocted to get out of sex in the last year.

WAYS TO GET OUT OF SEX WITH HUSBAND:

Contagious flu. Nobody could have as many cases of influenza as me in the last year and not be in an iron lung.

Thrush, from the taking of imaginary penicillin capsules to cure the fabricated flu.

The yoghurt up the fanny to cure the imaginary thrush.

Addressing him in baby talk. ‘Who is Mama’s iddy, biddy baby boy then?’ whilst trying to put your nipple in his mouth.

Taking a child into the marital bed because of a nightmare. The playing of scary videos before bed greatly helps in this department.

Setting off the smoke alarm. Talk about dampening his spirits.

Asking him what position he’d like to do it in, then laughing hysterically when he answers.

Being too demanding. ‘Hey, I feel like stripping each other naked with our teeth, wrestling in Jello, hiding strawberries up my twat which you have to retrieve with your tongue, slathering ourselves in chocolate, and then executing the Kama Sutra for seven hours before climaxing outside on the pavement for an added erotic frisson. Then we can recover for ten minutes and do it all over again! Are you up for it?’ For added effect you then squeeze his balls as though testing the air in a tyre.

If these usual contraceptive ruses don’t work, there are the regulation insults to the penis. A wife can always take to saying loudly, ‘Is it in yet?’ Followed by ‘They always say that men with tiny equipment have great personalities. And you do, darling! You really, really DO.’

Or you could try a variation on this theme: ‘It’s not the size of a man’s penis, it’s the . . . no, it’s the size.’

Of course, there are more tried and tested detumescents like –

1) ‘What am I supposed to do with it . . . floss?’

2) ‘A toothpick! Why? Do I have food in my teeth?’

3) ‘You know, love, I saw an episode of Nip/Tuck where they performed surgery to fix that.’

If more imagination is required, one day simply explain to your husband that you can only really enjoy sex if you bring along your best friend and just when he’s getting excited, wondering which of your girlfriends is up for a threesome, drop in the fact that your best friend these days is a gay manicurist called Merlyn.

If you’re really desperate for a good night’s sleep, you can employ my tiptop favourite sex-stalling technique. Warning: this must be used sparingly so as not to induce heart failure. Just when hubby’s snuggling up and you feel the prod of his penis in your back, mention casually that the Inland Revenue telephoned and want to audit his accounts. Not only will he lose the inclination for sex, he’ll also lose the desire for sleep, which means you won’t have to put up with his snoring either.

As I ruminated on the above, I noted how the bedsprings were mourning beneath us as if mocking my misery. Having stopped contemplating new colours for the ceiling, I took to wondering exactly how many shoes I owned? Twenty-eight pairs, I deduced. Oh, the things you can fathom when time is on your side!

I sucked in air in alarm. What had happened to me? I wasn’t even faking orgasms, I was flunking them. On those official Name/Address/Age forms, after it says Sex – I would have to write ‘NOT IF I CAN POSSIBLY HELP IT’.

Predictably, Rory then rolled me over on my side without a nuzzle or a kiss. Jesus. Come to think of it, there never was any kissing any more. Just as Jazz had predicted. When had we stopped kissing during sex, I wondered. Rory thrust away once, twice. As usual, each move was so mechanical, I could draw a diagram of it. He’d never asked me my favourite position – which is, by the way, Deputy Head Teacher. A promotion I’d never achieve if I didn’t get some bloody shut-eye. I was just about to point this out to my husband when he began groping round for my clitoris. And groping and groping and. . .

Why is it that men can assemble a hand-held rocket grenade launcher off the Internet, and yet they can’t find . . . Oh wait. Yes. Houston, we have lift-off! But as a feeling of pleasure began to spread through me, I stayed quiet. God knows I didn’t want to encourage the man! That would delay sleep even further. Then he might want to keep going. It used to be that women faked orgasms. Now we faked NOT having them! But I didn’t need to pretend that I wasn’t being pleasured for long because Rory then began prodding at me as though he was running late for a meeting and my clitoris was the elevator button. Prod. Prod. Prod. Oh, just take the stairs! This lift only stops at one floor, anyway. The pelvic floor and, God knows, that needs some work. But hell, so did the rest of me. My hair, full of nit napalm, was encased in a plastic shower cap. As if that weren’t unattractive enough, I was also wearing saggy, baggy flannelette pyjamas and airline bedsocks. Flannelette pyjamas are the sexual equivalent of soldiers laying mine-fields across the entrance to their tunnels.

When, I speculated, did this slow-drip sexual ennui set in? Exactly when did sex become more dutiful than enthusiastic? We used to do something that involved a fair bit of nestling and stroking – I couldn’t remember what exactly, but I do remember that I liked it. What happened to those sex-surfeited days we once had where we dinged furniture, took headboard divots out of the wall, broke beds, destroyed mattresses and ran up chiropractic