THERE ARE THREE OF US IN THIS MARRIAGE AND IT IS GETTING RATHER CROWDED

A wife's rant about being married to a journalist.

If your journalist husband is anything like mine, he probably started out with piles of newspaper clippings (sorry, very important references) cluttering up the place, that you were eventually able to surreptitiously remove from the home unnoticed.  

Hard at work journalist, looking for more papers to save

These life or death clippings were kept in special folders, for that special moment when they would be required again.  Mine never even noticed that I had binned them.

Of course there are also notepads and pens everywhere.  'One can never have too many pens', is my journalist's motto.  Well we didn't have too many pens, we have FAR too many pens.  We have pens from hotels, conferences, restaurants, workmen; we have cheap ones and expensive ones and we even have pens that we've actually purchased.  Did Alan notice when they started disappearing from the house?  No.  Why not?   Because he was still bringing them in by the bucket load!

Then there are the bags.  Alan is addicted to free bags.  Well, he'll pay if he has to, but the thrill is better if the bag is free.  We have bags from much the same places that we have pens from, but throw in duty-free and supermarket freebies for good measure.  He tells me he needs all these bags as he may have to carry all those clippings (what clippings?) and pens (what pens?) to work with him.  What for?  He can only carry one bag at a time.  It isn't like he matches them to his shoes or anything creative like that.  

Anyway, every so often, I have a bag purge, and so whilst Alan is standing on a chair, trying to push a free Tiger Beer backpack behind the free Asian Tigers Removals laptop bag at the top of the wardrobe, I am shouting at him "I can still see it you know, THROW IT OUT"!  I wouldn't mind if he used them (well actually I would - I mean, Tiger Beer?!), but most of them have never been used. 

I should digress here for a moment into the laundry bag collection, which is a whole subset of the bag collection.  This stemmed from the supermarket bag collection that Alan stored under his sink, in his bachelor days in France.  Not one or two bags, no.  We are talking enough bags to restock the supermarket.  Anyway, that collection morphed into collecting the plastic laundry bags at hotels, which were not used for our dirty laundry.  No, they were carefully folded in all their pristine newness and taken home, to be used for putting our clean laundry in next time we travelled!  

Of course now that they use cloth bags in hotels, we have a huge collection of those, as they never get thrown away, just washed.

So, when the Blackberry arrived home with its scathing new master (I shan't be a slave to it, bloody technology, people never put them down, look at those people spending the whole of their meal time on their phones instead of enjoying each others company), I thought all would be safe.  Nothing to cut out, nothing to clutter up the place, nothing to store.  

Indeed I was a happy bunny, until I realised that he had stopped being scathing and simply replaced his previous addictions with a new one.   

Whilst the Blackberry may not hit his acquisitive desire button, it does take up about as much time as compiling all the other collections put together.  So now I have a different journalist's tool to contend with. 

Okay, I know it's his livelihood, and he needs this device, but to quote the late Princess of Wales, 'there are three of us in this marriage and it is getting a little crowded'.  I doubt he saw the meal arrive.

Has he even noticed that we are no longer in the restaurant?  Hey look, a free bag also!

Okay, to be fair, this was written on a day when I was fed up with the Blackberry intruding on our day.  Also, it does make life easier for him in some respects, but its pervasiveness in our life really annoys me.   What could have been a really lovely day, was shared with a cheeping, beeping Blackberry.

I have to admit however, if it was an iphone I could better understand the attachment..!