Pinched

My wife decided she was going to become a #tradwife.

She explained that she wasn’t going back to work, and that I would be bringing in the bread from here on, while she did school drop offs and watched Traitors in the afternoon.

I wasn’t sure about this bargain, and so I consulted my favourite book on marriage counseling, Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War. There was a passage that struck me in particular: "Rapidity is the essence of war: take advantage of the enemy's unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots."

So I emailed work and handed in my notice. I was initiating a game of unemployment chicken, where we would see who could hold out the longest as the mortgage repayments mounted. I told my wife over dinner and she spat out her lobster hollandaise (we were accustomed to quite a luxurious life). She tried to shrug it off nonchalantly, replying the lobster was a tad on the dry side and unpalatable, and that she couldn’t care less if I quit my job. My petulance was certain to be spasmodic and short-lived, and I’d be back at the desk in no time.

She had a point. I have always been prone to changes in mind. My future self might revert this decision, so I realised he would have to be sabotaged permanently. I hence embarked on a crusade of irreparable damage to my own professional reputation.

The first steps I took were to undermine the data reports I’d built over the last three years. I started with the basics. I disrupted nightly refreshes of data, changed the calculations, and deleted swaths of the underlying sources. Yet after a few weeks I still had not heard anything, and it dawned on me that no-one cared about what I was doing every day of my life. I was forced to resort to more base techniques of self-ruination, and on a Tuesday morning, exposed myself to the head of HR.

At this point, my wife started to take my intentions more seriously. She launched her first argument on the merits of my returning to work. “It’s your patriarchal privilege,” she said, “us back in the kitchen, you making things happen out in the world, and I’m serving it all up to you on a plate.” She said I was looking a gift horse in the mouth. “Oppress me,” she screamed, “Opprrrreesss me!” She screamed again.

It was quite arousing.

There was only one thing for it, I was going to have to dismantle the patriarchy. I marched down to Peckham’s Centre For Social Justice Activism to offer a helping hand. Behind the desk, a portion of a woman’s face and neck was visible between two hedges of armpit hair. I took a breath and was preparing to make my case. “Shutup and sit down!” She commanded. She’d taken one look at me and my background check’s list of attended public schools and got my measure. “From here on you do the listening” she barked.

It was quite arousing.

I received 50 lashes, all while being made to repeat mantras too obscene for print. Upon which I was provided a certificate of my repentance and ordered on a holy mission to restore the universe’s gender pay ratio. It was decreed: my wife must return to work.

I presented this to my wife, who again shrugged. Woke is dead, she said, and cancelling was never even real anyway. Furthermore, she added, those lash marks on my back were drawn in red felt tip pen and the certificate written in my own handwriting (and using the same red felt tip pen).

It appeared that we were committed to the stand off.

When you have been married for 10 years you think that you know a person. However when my wife opened the letter from the bank repossessing the house, she didn’t miss a beat. She looked at me as cool as a cucumber and murmured “well I never much liked it here anyway,” and I have to say I really was quite surprised. The old gal had more fight in her than I’d thought.

Yet more impressive still was the poker face she pulled when social services took away our eldest child. “Well that’s why we made three” she said, “good to have a couple spare” and went back to her sudoku from the newspaper she found on the pavement next to where we slept. “7… that’s the one!” she cried triumphantly, and a carefree smile spread across her cheeks, one belonging to someone whose whole life was now an eternal Sunday afternoon.

I threw the paper out her hands and shouted I wasn’t buying it. “Of course you’re not,” she said, “you’re not buying anything, you don’t have a job.” It was then, reaching into the puddle to retrieve a soggy crossword section, that she caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection and was struck by an idea. She was still an attractive woman, it wouldn’t be hard to find a rich guy who would be man enough to oppress her properly.

It’s been a while that I’ve seen her since, but last I heard she’s shacked up in a large house in Herne Hill with someone called Tod who works in property. She got the kids back and spends most of her days in the salon, gossiping with similar ladies all sitting under those great plastic helmet dryers, the sort you usually only see in old American TV shows.

And what about me? Well I lost everything, but not my dignity. I stuck to my guns for Christ’s sake. At least I can reflect on my actions and feel proud when I look myself in the mirror (what I now call that puddle next to my sleeping bag). On top of that I haven’t worked a day since this whole affair began, I’m a #tradhobo, I’m living the dream.

It was in the middle of these elations flooding my mind that, by chance, I came across an old and greasy copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in the bin where I rummage for sandwiches. I licked a little ketchup off the top and continued where I left off, but quickly came across a passage that made my whole world fall apart.

"In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns. For there has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited."

I’d got it all wrong and came to ruin for nothing. The last six months of my life shrank into glib allegory, and this little fable - together with the sorry figure I cut at its conclusion - had produced its moral:

If, in this great and complex existence of ours, you are going to take advice from a book, then you should at least make sure to read the second chapter.

---

Lobster With Hollandaise

Once upon a time you dressed so fine,

You threw the bums a dime in your prime,

Didn’t you?

Ingredients

• 2 lobsters

• 2 large egg yolks

• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

• 113g butter

Method

This hollandaise sauce can be made using a hand blender and without faff.

But first the lobsters. Use a pot large enough to hold them both without crowding them. Fill it with enough well-salted water to fully submerge the lobsters (about 3–4 litres). Bring the water to a rolling boil over high heat. Add the live lobsters one at a time, return the water to the boil, then cover and start timing, maintaining a rolling boil (but not so high it boils over). Boil for about 8–10 minutes for lobsters around 500–600 g each. Remove with tongs and allow to drain before serving or splitting.

Blend the egg yolks with a little water, lemon juice, and salt in a cup just wide enough for an immersion blender. Melt butter until hot and bubbling and turn off heat. With the blender running at the bottom of the cup, slowly pour in the hot butter so it emulsifies into a smooth, thick sauce. Adjust with a splash of warm water if needed, season to taste, and serve right away while warm.

Serve with a bit of watercress.

For original information on this revolution in emulsion, see Serious Eats recipe here.