Lavazza

Wednesday

Rachel Johnson

Why am I so bad at presents?

From our UK edition

My life of non-stop glamour and sizzle continues. Over breakfast in our Notting Hill ‘country kitchen’ I noticed the large cardboard box lying out by the bins. This is not unusual. Since Covid/WFH, deliveries are more frequent than drone strikes in the Donbas. ‘Bound to be for you,’ said Ivo. ‘Actually, could be your birthday present.’ He went back to his study of the Times. You may think this is an unorthodox way of presenting your wife with her birthday present. But there is nobody to blame but me, according to my husband, who declares I’m ‘terrible at presents’. My birthday – not that anybody cares – is on 3 September, at the height of la rentrée. My mother would therefore cleverly disguise things I needed for school as objects of desire.

Wednesday

Rachel Johnson

A kitchen sink drama

From our UK edition

‘We had a terrible row just before you all arrived,’ I was saying in a stage whisper over breakfast on Sunday morning, fortified by an iron skillet of bacon and eggs sizzled on the Aga. We’d reached the toast and second round of coffee stage, and the reason I was whispering was my husband Ivo was still upstairs in bed after a restless night, and I didn’t want him to hear my whinge and rev up the row. Geoff’s buttery knife remained poised over the jar of marmalade. Like many men, he can’t multitask, to the extent that he can neither speak nor listen to someone else speaking without freezing, like deer when they spot a hunter on the hill. I summarised the proximate as opposed to underlying causes of the row for Geoff and co.