Real life | 28 March 2019

‘This clean sock regime is really annoying,’ said the builder boyfriend, as he rummaged through his newly inaugurated top drawer.

I had toyed with the idea of giving him two small drawers as I did last time he graced my domestic arrangements with his presence. But this time I gave him the entire chest: that’s four drawers in total.

That’s a lot of commitment on my part and a fair amount on his, too. It scared him, understandably. ‘You’ll be wanting rent next,’ he said, grinning sardonically.

‘Aren’t you pleased, having all your clothes so nicely arranged?’ I had put everything away for him while he was at work and when he came back it was a fait accompli, this entire chest of drawers thing, taking our on/off relationship to a whole new level of severity.

At first he didn’t say much, and just got on with getting his socks out of the top drawer, his polo shirts out of the middle drawer, his jeans out of the bottom, or his paint-covered work trousers off the floor of the undecorated corridor leading to the loft, and so on.

But a few days later, he erupted in a display of petulance. ‘This clean sock regime…’ he fulminated, making a palaver out of laboriously pulling on a freshly washed pair of socks as though the process were torture. ‘They don’t fit right when you keep washing them. I have to wear them in all over again.’

This is a very interesting aspect of the psyche of a ‘bloke’, anthropologically speaking. I mean bloke as in the opposite of bearded hipster or metrosexual. I mean bloke as in person who gets in a battered truck and goes off to clamber about on building sites all day and eat in places he pronounces ‘caff’.