Sunday, January 3, 2010

You’re not the boss of me...

I was looking for something during the week and I chanced to find a very precious piece of paper that I had put away in such a safe place that I had forgotten where it was for about two years.

The piece of paper in question was an invitation I had received a few years ago to meet the President, which, all in all, was a pretty cool day in my life.

Finding the invitation got me digging out the photo I have from the day and then thinking back to fact that there is one man in this country who has been put in an impossible position.

Yep that’s the President’s husband.

Okay you might argue that he gets to travel all around the world and stuff on the strength of the fact that she’s the President, but hey what about the normal everyday kinda stuff, like umm, deciding what to watch on television.

Even if he did think he’d be master of the remote, the old trump card would be played every time.

“I want to watch it and I AM the President.”

Nope as far as positions in life go, I reckon the poor old President’s hubby might have drawn a short straw.

And then of course there are the visitors. I mean how many of us have been in a position where their darling wife or husband has announced without warning that there would be some visitors coming on the very day you had planned to go to golf/football/bingo/dancing class....whatever.

Usually when it happens too it’s a visitor that you might not have all that much time for but it does prompt... “and they’re coming tomorrow so we’d better get the place tidied up.”

I could never understand that logic.

Is it really right that you have to worry so much about getting your house nice and clean? Or is it just a big lie?

Yeah sure it is nice to have things looking nice. If you’ve finally caught that annoying bluebottle and squashed him against the wall with the Argos catalogue it’s natural to want to clean the mark off.

Yeah, sure it’s fine to clean up things like that, but when it gets to stages like you start to alphabetise your spice rack, you might consider giving some serious thought as to why you're doing all this.

And believe me folks there are plenty of people out there who go to extreme lengths to be tidy.

Personally I do it to be courteous. And to lie. I like people who visit to think that in our house we are really neat all the time.

Making sure it is tidy does mean a bit of hard work and preparation before guests arrive and there are very few houses in Ireland that has as many guests as the President’s pad in Phoenix Park.

I can just imagine the conversations there when the President announces over breakfast on a Sunday morning the list of guests she’s expecting for the week.

That announcement of course would be a reminder to hubby that he dare not even think of going to golf/football/bingo/dancing class.

And indeed a reminder that there is hoovering to be done before the first of the guests arrive.

And the thing is he can’t even argue that he did it last time either, because once again that old trump card would come out and surely he couldn’t expect the President to be running around dusting.

Okay, so they do have people who do the dusting and hoovering and stuff but he still has to turn up and meet and greet people like me when his mind is probably wandering off to some happy place where he has full and total control of the remote.

With all that in mind I pretty much decided that I’d never want to be in such a position and would instead settle for occasionally being the boss in my own house.

And like that’s ever going to happen...

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