The Witch is Back

The Witch is Back ©

The witch is back is what we say when mummy, my wife, comes back from her travels, either to the Aldi or Sainsburys or Korea Foods or the Chinese wholesalers. I spend a lifetime carrying carriers, she just jumps into her car and away she goes. Which is all very normal for a Birmingham/Shanghai family. That has now changed, why has it changed? Because of the invention of the hands free mobile, with free phone calls bundle.

The wife as I call her, it’s a reference to a former day and to Les Dawson school of comedy, the wife is a talker, she does work in sales and ecommerce after all. She spends her day talking to everybody here in Birmingham and to staff at the Peking office too. Peking was the name for the capital for those of you too young to remember, now we say Beijing, I  just thought I’d give you a quick History lesson.

Anyway the wife loves to talk, and we get the benefit of her wisdom as she drives hand free home to us. The orders and commands come thick and fast, along with the witch’s laugh, in English and in Shanghai dialect, don’t forget to vacuum, put my rice on, have you started your homework yet, has Totoro our cat, with the Japanese name, has Totoro done her business, and if she has then have we cleaned the litter tray. By the way Totoro can and will pee in the bath if she thinks the litter tray is not clean enough, she’ll even pooh in the bath too. She is an educated cat after all, she watches all the family use the bathroom, so she joins in, we are a family after all.

Back to the witch, she will phone 10 times a day to check up on us while she is picking vegetables or looking at fashion in the shops. The phone has free calls after all, so we have the benefit, or the curse of the calls. She’ll tell us she has bought some sea bass or any other weird fish, some are still alive when she brings them home, so we gather around for the requiem, luckily the fishmonger has tied claws together.

If you like it’s a verbal blog, a torrent of talk if you allow me to use cheap alliteration, as I said to my small daughter, a future writer, who uses alliteration writers, who cannot write. I just shouted that question to my small daughter, and she replied straight away, though she said it’s not true. Hang on I must answer the house phone again, I’m being asked to bring in the washing, but no mud of my feet, an impossible task from an invisible wife, made visible by her too many free phone calls.