Sir Douglas Voletrouser

"Things my girlfriend and I argue about"

By Mil Millington.

The quality with which I am identified most closely is probably fairness. There's an almost breathless speed about my disposition, when appropriate, to say, 'Margret, I am clearly in the wrong here. Please smash up my stuff.' However, there are times when the Shield Of Justice gleams on my arm and all of Margret's shouted accusations merely strike it and fall, lifeless, to the ground. Averted eyes and a slowly shaking head tell that I am in a place where she cannot touch me. Yes, as you ask, I am thinking of something specific. You don't know me, right? You're aware, perhaps, that my hair's bright red, you know I've got some Web space, you have a certain suspicion that in quiet moments I speculate on what it must be like to be rubbed all over with a Nastassja Kinski - but that's it. It's not like, say, we've being going out with each other for something over sixteen years and have had two children and decorated a landing together. Given that, let me place before you a scenario: You are leaving the house to go shopping for a number of hours. Just before you go, you poke your face towards me (I, hunched and unblinking, am playing a computer game of the most frantic and intricate kind) and say, 'If it starts to rain, get the washing in off the line.' Now, you know what's going to happen, don't you? You've never even met me, and yet you know what's going to happen. So if Margret, with whom I've lived for well over a decade and a half, doesn't bother to employ painfully basic foresight to see what's obviously going to happen... well, the Shield Of Justice is mine, I reckon.