Spread-betting

My husband is a lovable fool in many respects. But one thing he can do is sums in his head.  Well Jonah didn’t get his maths gene from me, now did he?

Tom’s no whizz kid, but he does spend his working life concentrating on five screens of scrolling numbers whilst also watching last night’s football highlights and paying significant amounts of attention to Twitter.

A Jack of all trades, Tom can as easily knock up an Ikea wardrobe as fix a dishwasher, put a new screen on my broken iPhone or stitch new covers for a chair I’ve rescued forom the Hackney streets – often wearing just his pants. He makes bread and pasta from scratch, his own brand of Tommy’s special sauce – ketchup, since you’re asking, and he’s pretty handy in bed too.

Yes, I know he’s fairly perfect – I’d only really change his teeth  (and I sorta wish he had tattoos, long hair and played the guitar like /was Evan Dando, if only the world worked like that). But by christ, he can be a right little princess when he’s giving up fags.

I’m blunt to the point of rudeness most of the time, but mostly it’s just my weird sense of humour. And Tom, being an affable chap, takes a lot of flack from my acid tongue, and shakes it off like a puppy after a swim, which is one of the main reasons I knew it would work out okay between us. But without a regular dose of nicotine, he becomes agitated and hand flappy, like someone’s just stuck a vacuum hose up his bum and switched it on, suddenly.

I knew he’d be edgy by today, not least from still suffering the after effects of Saturday’s party, but it’s a rare treat for the pair of us to take a day off together and hang out, just the two of us, so we were both making an effort to be super nice.

It’s probably the first time since Jonah was born, in fact, that we’ve gone on a daytime jaunt. Don’t get me wrong, we go out after bedtime as often as we can persuade the neighbours downstairs to babysit, but during the day there are normally too many reasons not to, mainly financial or childcare related, but then those things are intertwined.  But since Tom turned 40, we thought it would be nice to have an adult jolly while the sun was shining.

We went to Ascot.  (This is posh horse racing, for my non-British readers: I know you’re out there.) It’s the most middle class thing we’ve done in ages, and harks back to a time before Tom met me, when he had an apartment in the South of France, a speedboat and a lawyer wife – yes, I was the ruin of him, one way or another – at least on paper.

It was free race day, and I was a race virgin – well it’s good to know there are still I things I haven’t tried – so I bought meself a hatinator (cross between hat and fascinator: not so big as former, not as frilly as latter. It’s awesome. Predict next big thing in millinery. Thanks to ‘one for the road’ Kate for coining the phrase)  and we packed a picnic, the kids off to school and off we jaunted.

There was minor bickering on the bus, leading to both of us frantically puffing on e-fags on the tube looking like a right pair of reprobates, blowing fake smoke all over TFL.

But the sun was out, we cracked open the Cava, and proceeded to live it up like it was 2008. I hadn’t thought about betting. God, we’re too broke to be chucking money about, and after blowing my budget on head frippery, and Tom blowing his on party frippery, the financials for the day were looking a bit slim.

But when it comes to planning in advance, Tom’s yer man, which is one of the things that was irritating me the most about him throughout the day. I deal in concepts and he deals with details and sometimes, he can get a little pedantic  when I know perfectly well what I’m doing.

But, in his own way, so does Tom. He’d done his homework, as always. In the broking house, where he works, there are plenty of habitual  gamblers who know what they’re talking about , so Tom had picked up tips in advance from a race horse trainer, no less, with whom he works.

Race one and half of bottle of Cava and two Pimms down, I was like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady as our horse came in. By the time we were winners twice and then thrice, I was looking at my husband with new found admiration, and chancing my arm on a fourth. We ended up up. Once we’d paid for the hatinator, our train tickets, the Cava and the one bet we lost, we were pretty much flat and had had a massive laugh in the sun, just the two of us.

We bickered like a pair of little girls on the way home though, but by then, my hangover was kicking in, and we were staring down the barrel of getting the kids into bed. But it made me remember how great Tom is at picking up where I leave of. Concepts, details. We make a good team. And when we’ve both kicked the nicotine, maybe we’ll stop sweating the small stuff.  As they say, look after the pennies and the pounds take care of themselves.

Well that’s the gamble, anyway.