The Diary of Two Nobodies Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  List of Illustrations

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preamble

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  Postcript

  Giles’s Seven Point Plan for a Strong and Stable Marriage

  Mary’s Five Point Plan for a Strong and Stable Marriage

  Glossary of terms

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  A Year in the Life of Giles & Mary

  Giles is a countryman who relishes solitude. His wife Mary thrives in company and enjoys frequent escapes to London.

  After thirty years in a marriage of opposites, Giles and Mary have adapted to a life of domestic misunderstandings within comical misadventures.

  In The Diary of Two Nobodies you will discover first-hand what occurs when a man who sees himself as a cross between Mr Bean and Basil Fawlty shares his life with a woman who identifies closely with the Queen.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Mary Killen is a busy journalist, with a weekly column in The Spectator, and regular contributions in many other national publications. This is her sixth book.

  Giles Wood is an accomplished artist, and is also a published writer, with columns in The Telegraph and The Oldie.

  Giles and Mary appear together on Channel 4’s Gogglebox, commenting on the week’s telly. They have two grown-up daughters and live near Pewsey, Wiltshire.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS BY GILES WOOD

  Bagwomaning on Pewsey Station

  Giles Watering the Road

  A Bed Blocker in Room Three

  Heron (after Thomas Bewick)

  Grottage Kitchen

  Knuckle Cut

  Phoebe the Dog

  Hotel Mundal, Norway

  Garden Shed

  Ground Floor Plan

  All illustrations - pen and ink on paper.

  GILES

  To E O Wilson,

  Who first inspired my work towards the proactive conservation of amphibians and invertebrates in the quest to restore bioabundance.

  Even if, regrettably, at the occasional expense of neglecting my own wife and family.

  MARY

  To Gug, Karl and Syrah,

  Beloved bed blockers who have helped carry the chain.

  PREAMBLE

  MARY: My mother always told me to count to ten before flying off the handle. But it’s not possible to use this tactic with Giles. Family members and friends know that he actually wants us to fly off the handle following his provocations. We can tell this is so because dimples are the sign that he is happy and they appear in his cheeks as he sees someone ranting in reaction to a bespoke comment which would enrage only that person. And so to the outside observer that person will look hysterical and bad by favourable contrast to gentle Giles with his dimples.

  Why does he want to be so annoying? He claims he is suffering from ‘classic Middle Child Syndrome’. And that the only way he could get his parents’ attention during his childhood was by annoying them.

  The other day I found a suitcase of my old diaries in the attic. Inside were thousands of words written in bitterness about Giles’s appalling behaviour, and not just the bespoke provocations. From the perspective of twenty years on, they just made me laugh and wonder why on earth I had got so cross at the time.

  The treasure trove reminded me of how therapeutic it can be to write things down – a diary is a poor man’s psychotherapist. Instead of speaking to the therapist at £100 an hour, and them saying nothing, you pour it all out into your diary and reach the same conclusions without paying.

  GILES: Since appearing on Gogglebox and suddenly having time to talk to each other, we had begun to remember what we originally liked about each other, and to see how dialogue is the best way to arrive at a peace settlement. With the thirtieth anniversary of our marriage approaching, it was time to expand on this dialogue by beginning another journal, this time with myself as co-author, to take things a step forward by analysing, not just for ourselves, but for the public consumption of the small audience who seem interested in us, anecdotal accounts of the various hurdles life and marriage throws up at a couple in a bid to try to see what, in the dread words of the politicians, lessons can be learned.

  In this we are, of course, invading our own privacy but, if it helps other couples to save their own marriages it will be worth it.

  MARY: In the meantime, I have recently started, in tandem with my own work diary, which just details appointments, an equivalent rest diary for Giles to prove to him once and for all that he is suffering from a sort of Work Dysmorphia. While he genuinely believes he is working very hard every day on writing and painting and house maintenance, I hope to prove that in fact he is gardening for up to sixty hours a week.

  GILES: Gogglebox has definitely saved Mary and my marriage. It’s a wonderful thing to have a perspective on how you are viewed by other people, i.e. the public, who have seen us on telly, and who, according to the Twittersphere – which neither of us follows but my sister kindly sends me a digest from each week: six positive tweets and one negative (for balance) – keep repeating the phrase ‘relationship goals’. I don’t know what it means but it seems to be positive. Viewers seem to think it a plus that we are able to finish each other’s sentences, for one thing.

  Working together by watching telly at the same time, meant that we suddenly no longer lived like two intimate strangers who passed in the night – Mary working from 6 am till 8 pm, then falling asleep slightly drunk at 9 pm; me gardening from 1 pm till 3.30, when I have lunch, and then going to bed at two in the morning after watching vintage horror films like Basket Case, Carrie or The Wicker Man. These habits meant we had precisely one hour in each other’s company per day from 8 to 9 pm, at a time when Mary was shattered after a full day’s work and I was at my peak of alertness.

  It took public interest in our marriage to make us think about it objectively. Are we actually happy? So I have agreed to keep a diary – or at least notes and observations of the marriage – as a way of acting as our own management consultants to see what negative patterns recur which could be corrected. Patterns such as Mary gallivanting in London, while I keep the show on the road at home.

  The problem with most thirty-year-old marriages is drift. We are told that opposites attract but sometimes our marriage feels like Brexit and Remain. Continental drift is the tendency of tectonic plates to move away from each other. As people grow old they change and their interests diverge, although Mary claims that while she moves with the times I have been ‘stranded in the Seventies’ and so effectively we are living in parallel universes.

  The signs of incompatibility were always there. Mary, upwardly mobile and socially incontinent, while I am downwardly mobile and want to buy a static caravan to reduce costs and restrict my social life to other like-minded worthy folk interested in the pro-active conservation of moths and butterflies and in archaeology. I want to mix with people who can advance my knowledge rather than my social status.

  When I first met Mary, we hung out with the Eighties version of the Made in Chelsea set, playing court jesters to people who were superior in social rank to ourselves. These were the sort of people who appeared in the Bystander pages of Tatler (where Mary had got her first job in journalism). What eventually put me off this set was someone showing me a vi
deo of one of the weddings we went to at the time. Although I enjoyed seeing a younger version of myself, I noted I was following Mary obediently around, dressed as a penguin and looking utterly bored and dejected. It was like when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a shop window and you think, ‘who on earth is that?’

  While Mary’s idea of happiness is the sort of conversations which emerge through being a member of a house party of twenty for a week or so, some of the best conversations I’ve had in the last thirty years have been with a Peugeot mechanic who operates from an agricultural building in a field in Gloucestershire. I found I could easily spend two hours with him putting the world to rights, both of us leaning into the Peugeot estate’s bonnet, without any progress on the alternator having been made.

  MARY: How come we’re still married after thirty years? I believe there’s a reason why our generation has more stamina to withstand marital irritation in the short term and wait for the good times to roll around again. We were born and grew up and had already developed our telly-watching habits over decades before the widespread advent of videotapes and DVDs (circa 1985). Tolerance, patience, respectful attention, on the grounds that we will probably see the point if we continue concentrating…those were the values inculcated into us in the days when there was no alternative to ‘sitting out’ a programme.

  As on telly, so in life. Our generation is accustomed to just keeping going through the boring or difficult times while those who’ve come after us have been programmed, not to ‘give it a chance’ but instead to fast forward or eject. PROOF: everyone who saw it first time around agrees that the film Doctor Zhivago is a masterpiece, yet try showing it to anyone under thirty. They simply don’t have the mental stamina to keep watching.

  The theory that riding out the bad times and not expecting perma-pleasure will pay off in the long term is borne out by Roger Bamber, partner at the 900-lawyer strong Mills & Reeve. When clients walk in looking to file for divorce, the first thing Bamber does is to try to persuade them not to. Says Bamber, ‘Six years down the line, a large percentage of our clients regret their divorce.’

  Yet divorce has become something of an epidemic and to me the link with fast forward and eject is obvious. Sticking out the nuisance has much more going for it in the long run.

  GILES: I like the idea that, by not divorcing, we are bucking a trend. Moreover, I always say that far too high a premium in our society is based on achieving personal happiness.

  APRIL

  Wednesday 6th

  MARY: I was desperate to go to Marlborough for all sorts of things so my heart sank when, looking out at the glorious view of the Downs from Room Two (see floor plan) I noted that the Volvo was neither in the field nor parked in the road in front of the cottage. Giles had driven somewhere without telling me. And of course, because he doesn’t carry a mobile, I couldn’t ring to give him a list of what we needed.

  GILES: Mary can’t drive a car. After 80 lessons over twenty years with three separate instructors she had only mastered the skill of going forward with an instructor beside her in a dual control car. When it came to changing gear she found it challenging, claiming that the ‘thinking load’ became impossible.

  She can ride a bicycle but is wobbly on it and has a lot of minor accidents, for example, with insects flying into her mouth as she is screaming at me to wait for her. I am thinking she might get a moped but we would need to take her to a disused aerodrome to practise riding it. On second thoughts, she might then be mown down by learner drivers who also use these places.

  There is a history of moped incompetence in her family. When her aunt Sheila bought a moped for use in her work as a nurse in Belfast in the 1960s, the vehicle was delivered and the garageman demonstrated the starting procedure. But before he had shown her the braking…Sheila, allegedly, got onto it and went round and round the block interminably. Each time she passed the house her family shouted at her to stop but she shouted back that she didn’t know how to and had to continue the circuit until she had run out of petrol.

  The reason I don’t always tell Mary when I’m going into town is that she’s a hoarder, and we don’t need her to buy any more so-called goods. I don’t want to be held up outside an endless series of shops while she goes into a trance, picking things up and then putting them down again like a zombie.

  Also, Mary can never find me when she comes out of Waitrose. She says I should carry a mobile so she can contact me and find out where I’m parked, yet I believe that in a small market town she should be able to use her five senses to try to spot the outline of the Volvo parked somewhere on a high street only a quarter of a mile long. I am a great believer in setting initiative tests. As a follower of the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies, and a particular admirer of his dystopian novel After London, in which an unknown cataclysm causes society to relapse into barbarism, I believe that the innate skills of recognition of basic shapes and patterns should not be allowed to sink into desuetude. Indeed, our survival could depend on them.

  Friday 8th

  MARY: I have been accused of shopping for things I don’t need or ‘hoarding’, but this is untrue. It’s not that I’ve got too much stuff but that the cottage is too small.

  There are three shopping ‘opportunities’ around here.

  Pewsey, although pleasantly one-horse as a town, suffers from a condition we’ve dubbed Pewsey-itis. None of the shops seem to have the same half-day, for example. Dry-cleaning has to be dropped at the Post Office and the baker charges one pound one pence for a loaf of bread which means the girls behind the counter are constantly having to give out 99 pence in change with all the queue-lengthening time that involves. However, it is intimate with, for example, an electrician who remembers what white goods you own and will mend or change them without a receipt.

  Devizes is the least near of our shopping opportunities but it yields the most satisfaction for me. Although the town’s been over-developed, it has a quaint centre and much more of a feeling of real Wiltshire than has Marlborough. As our old friend Anne has pointed out, anywhere under a hundred miles from London has a whiff of London about it, and Devizes is a good fifteen miles further away than is Marlborough. Devizes has every kind of shop you could hope for, including a stationery shop, a health food shop, a tiny electrical goods shop selling things like two-bar electric fires, an independent chemist, a camera shop selling Kodak film, The Black Swan – a pub on the market square with crackling log fires – antiques and dogs inside it and proper food, to say nothing of a market every Thursday. But for me, the real joy lies in the eleven or more charity shops.

  Giles will do anything to prevent me going into the charity shops – for obvious reasons, and who can blame him. But I’ve always associated shopping with achievement, especially if I’ve bought what I call a bargain, and he calls ‘more stuff for landfill’. He would prefer it if I never was let loose in Devizes, but fortunately for us we are on the panel of an NHS dentist there. The ungreedy saint of a dentist welcomes one of us in there at least once a month so Giles has no option but to drive me.

  Giles buys very little on ecological grounds. The one thing he does buy, however, is office furniture. Naturally I don’t want horrid grey metal desks or swivel chairs but since we diagnosed his motive for the purchase he has stopped doing it. Basically, he has missed out on office life but has an innate longing for it.

  Giles usually hates going to Marlborough because of the spending opportunities in Waitrose, the White Horse Bookshop and the Foxtrot Vintage clothes shop. He feels beleaguered if he sees too many people he knows – for example, former fellow parents at our children’s schools – because he finds it hard to be ‘pleasant on demand’ when he is champing to get back to the garden.

  GILES: I’m a busy man. I wanted to quickly slip in to Marlborough’s admirable record shop – Sound Knowledge – one of the last remaining off-line means to purchase music, and buy a CD of Tales from Topographic Oceans by Yes. I used to own the original copy with artwork by Ro
ger Dean but a former landlady sold my entire record collection in the 1980s at a garage sale. Sound Knowledge is one of the few stores where you can find the album you are looking for just by describing its cover to the owner. A tiny CD, however, is no substitute for being able to pore over the artwork of a 1970s double concept album.

  Yes, featuring the eunuchy voice of Jon Lord, produced some of the most self-indulgent music ever to be committed to vinyl, but I have a secret admiration for classically trained, absurdly pompous progressive rock bands, and a particular weakness for Emerson, Lake and Palmer (formerly the Nice), King Crimson – especially the album Lizard – and early Genesis – Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound – but mostly when no one else is around. It’s funny how music can become a time capsule and send you hurtling back to the less complicated days of its origin. (I mean pre-children basically.)

  MAY

  Tuesday 3rd

  MARY: Another humiliating spectacle today on Pewsey Station. As usual, I’d had to work right up to the last moment. When it was time to leave either I would miss the last morning train to London by packing carefully, or I could simply fill bags with unedited piles of things I might need when I got there, including heaps of newsprint to read on the train and discard as I proceed through it.

  Of course, it would be a disaster if I arrived in London and found myself without mobile, keys or money, but for some reason I don’t seem able to discipline myself to have them in a set position ready for me to grab each time I leave for the train. The inevitable result is that I often find myself serially scattering the contents of the various bags on the station platform as I search to make sure I’ve got them.

  Meanwhile Giles, who doesn’t often come to London, turns Quisling, standing at a distance and disloyally rolling his eyes towards the other passengers as I scrabble.