You’re not the boss of me...
16.11.07
A couple of weeks ago now I
got the chance to travel to Dublin to meet the President
which was pretty cool (well it was better than spending
the day at work) but it made me realise that there was
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.
The thing is you can sometimes think your own home looks
worse than it does. There are times when we’ve had
guests who thought the place looked fabulous (unless
they were lying too of course and I wouldn’t rule out
that possibility!) when to me it looked like something
that should be roped off with police tape.
Making sure it is tidy though 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
hovering 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... |
 |
A DROP OF
PORTER is
the weekly
column of
Inishowen
Independent
editor,
Liam Porter. |
|
