Being jobless, I feel I should be taking the opportunity to slob out and go to seed like your normal bloke.You know, crawl out of bed at noon with a hangover, grab some pizza and a six-pack and slump in front of the telly watching the darts or the footie, belching occasionally. If the phone rings, I just say "Sorry mate, he's dead" and collapse back on to the sofa.
But being a liberated, reconstructed, new-age, feminist sort of guy, I'm incapable of being so degenerate and stereotypically masculine.
So I jump out of bed at 7.30 and after a healthy, nutritious breakfast I'm moving briskly round the house doing all those domestic chores that Jenny, being a ridiculously overworked lecturer, has little time for.
Renew the road tax? Done. Pay the bills? Say no more. Defrost the fridge? Rightaway. Call the plumber? No sweat. I'm incapable of the slatternly male thing of letting everything pile up until the house looks like a burglary hit it. Too much disorder and my brain starts clogging up and I hyperventilate.
If I'm on top of the household chores, then a bit of Me time is called for. And that doesn't mean flicking through GQ or John Grisham. I'm a liberated man, remember, so nothing less than serious cultural self-improvement will do. In other words, Booker prizewinners, new-wave cinema, cutting-edge art, that sort of thing. Serious brain-stretching, if you please, no gossip mags anywhere in sight.
No, slobbing out just doesn't come naturally. I've tried my best. I've had a go at slumping on the sofa, or dropping my dirty clothes on the floor, or leaving the washing-up for a week. But somehow it simply isn't me. I feel more like a character from Shameless* than the Nick I know and love. The fact is that I've been brought up to be tidy and conscientious and it's not a habit I can break easily.
*Shameless: a British TV series about the dysfunctional Frank Gallagher and his nine children, who live on a Manchester council estate.
