FA Cup Finals and Pointless Husbands

The FA Cup Final yesterday: well, the ladies', anyway. It was great fun, though Charlton startled us all by scoring before our girls had properly got out of the dressing room, in their heads at least. There was a lot of jumping up and down and shouting, and we won 4-1. The match had its moments, but there was a lot of random passing around the midfield. The Charlton goalie faffed and panicked a lot and was about four feet tall. There were nearly 25000 people there - I've seen the place emptier at a league match - and I wouldn't say the standard was any lower than it usually is at the City Ground.

I remember how I felt when we watched Arsenal beat ManU inCardiff in 2005 and this ... well, it just didn't feel the same. PatrickHerring vividly remembers being hugged almost to death by a screaming female relative on either side of him when Vieira sent his pen into the net that afternoon. Partly it was the lack of tension today; we knew we'd lost, that day in Cardiff, from about twenty minutes in. And partly it just didn't matter in the same way. Sad but true.

My tutor mailed me to say he'd found my answer phone message when he got back from holiday. He went away on holiday when he received my essay too. I love him to bits; maybe it's just jealousy when I say he seems to have an awful lot of holidays. He says he's 'looking into it' but disturbingly, he asked me whether I'd cleared my extension with something called 'regional learning support'. Now, I've never heard of them, and no one has ever suggested to me that I should clear an extension granted by a tutor with them, so I'm slightly anxious that he's covering his back.

So I celebrated this possibility by tactlessly asking the other half, with whom I'm supposed to be running a business, what he had done today, apart from a bit of shopping. All sorts of bits and pieces, he said. What bits and pieces? He read the mail, apparently, and did 'all sorts' of other bits to our accounts program. Did he translate anything? No. Did he do some work on last year's accounts? No. Or any other of the admin I haven't got time to do because I'm translating all the time? At this point he began to snarl. I don't know anyone who would put up with his work rate in either an employee or a partner, but I'm also supposed not to mention it. He said I was perfectly welcome to do as little work as he did, if I liked. So, er, where would our income come from. He shrugged.

I love this man dearly. My children also love him dearly, especially the youngest, who won't go to bed unless his daddy puts him there. I wanted to slap his face, hard. I imagined my hand prints on his cheeks. I am not a violent person. My palms itched. I went away and poured a glass of wine. I came upstairs and vented my rage on this blog.