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

is pregnant. What I want to say is, ‘This is a bumpy ride. For safety reasons, please keep all arms and legs within the speeding vehicle.’

Instead, I pick up the yellow paper.

I’m supposed to spend the day correcting Year 6 exercises on grammar.

Question: What comes at the end of a sentence?

Answer: Life imprisonment for murder.

2. How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

All husbands think they’re gods. If only their wives weren’t atheists . . .

During my twenties I thought I’d developed tinnitus, but it was just the endless ringing of wedding bells as all my friends got hitched. I married Rory, a vet, which is ironic as I’ve never been much of an animal person – possibly because I teach them all day. (Little bit of pathetic staff room humour there.) To me, animals are at their best on a barbecue. I especially hate dogs. Dogs have far too many teeth for a supposedly friendly nature. If I had to have a pet it would be a crocodile – so it could eat all the others.

And it’s not just our four-legged friends I loathe. I’m paranoid about all creatures, two-legged, one-legged, eight-legged. Each night before getting into bed, I check my sheets for scorpions – in England.

You may think you like animals, but believe me, if you were married to a vet you’d soon be cured. At any one time we have seven or eight dogs in the house, the same number of cats and a lot of mice which aren’t pets. When I was pregnant, Rory told people that I was ‘whelping’. Quite often he absentmindedly scratches me behind the ear and says, ‘Good girl.’ Pretty soon he’ll start throwing me a tennis ball to chew on.

If I had to imagine Rory as an animal, he’d be a Labrador – faithful and fun. I met him when he was dangling from the minute hand of the clock tower at college, which he’d climbed whilst inebriated, just so he could use the pick-up line, ‘Do you have the time?’ Rory is an outdoorsman. He has thighs the width of two seven-year-old kids put together and biceps the size of a guest bathroom. He’s built for outward-bound survival quests. A born frontiersman, he could ford a mighty river, scale a snow-capped mountain, fell a redwood forest, build a ranch house and have ‘vittels’ simmering in a pot – and all before I could say, ‘Who wants to eat at McDonald’s?’

For me, the Great Outdoors is the bit between Bond Street tube station and the front door of Selfridges. I grew up in Sydney (my parents moved here when I was sixteen). The only geography I have of London is how to get to Harrods then home again. When friends ask me to their country retreats in say, Scotland, their directions consist of, ‘Go to Harvey Nichols and turn right.’

I married Rory because he made me laugh.

The first time he took me to meet his mum in Cricklewood, he referred to the phenomenon of a son having lunch with his mother as the ‘edible complex’. The aquamarine eyes and the tawny curls springing out of his cranium in all directions kinda helped too. As did the way his face is lit up by that ready smile, which renders him instantly likeable. I also adore the way he cocks his elbow onto the window ledge of his car whilst whistling a tune. Oh, and his compassion. Even back then he was devoting half his time to voluntary work in homeless animal shelters. And nothing much has changed. He now has his own veterinary clinic adjoining our house in Kilburn, but does a lot of work for free.

Still, we are – or we were then – allies, spun together like silkworms. My love has always covered him, like treacle. And when he looks at me, a fondness spills and ripples over his face in a way that has always set my nipples on fire. After fifteen years of marriage, I’m far from oblivious to his downsides. He wears a battered leather jacket in all weathers, and owns the largest collection of T-shirts in the Western world. Formal wear for Rory consists of an ironed T-shirt. Even worse, he doesn’t like my friends. He says that London dinner parties account for three-quarters of the world supply of Condescension. He attends Jazz and Hannah’s social gatherings under duress, slumps in a corner and says nothing. ‘Oh, that’s your husband? I thought he was a bookend.’ Which is why he didn’t want us to go to Jazz and Studz’s twentieth wedding anniversary party last January. If only I’d listened to him. . .

It was meant to be a quiet celebratory dinner, with their oldest friends from university. But thanks to Studz’s inability to separate work from pleasure, the whole thing had become bigger than Dolly Parton’s hair.

Jazz married David Studlands while he was a young houseman on a surgical team at a big teaching hospital in Cambridge. She fell for him the first day they met. ‘He’s gorgeous,’ Jazz told me. ‘I just want to pop him on a canapé and eat him whole.’ Jazz, who graduated as a Home Economics teacher, supported him while he climbed the hospital ladder, by cooking in restaurants. Studz is now so wealthy he has a walk-in wallet and drives a rhymes-with-banker Jaguar, which he parks outside his private clinic in Harley Street. The man is not only handsome but so tall he has to radio down to us mere mortals below to see what the weather is like at street-level.

Even nearing fifty, Studz’s body has remained slimmed and gymmed. He has a profile so sharp you could shave your legs with it and an equally cutting tongue. His style is mocking, although he mainly mocks himself – but in a way which only amplifies his charms. As a top surgeon in reconstruction and burns repairs, Studz gets his academic kudos by working in an NHS