Location, Location, Location’s Kirstie Allsopp has established a reputation as the nation’s speaker of domestic truths. Every so often she pronounces on washing machines in kitchens (“disgusting”), children on iPads (“I broke theirs”) and marriage (“big weddings are a waste”). But I’m fairly sure Kirstie’s latest observation will not chime with many of her fans.
The presenter has revealed that since she has been with her partner, Ben Andersen, he has bought three houses without asking her (expert) advice, and that while on one occasion it made her cross, she says that “if you are a true couple and you love each other, then you trust each other”. Hmm. The fact that Andersen also works in property should be taken into consideration but it’s her definition of trust that bothers me. Yes, trust is the bedrock of a happy relationship, but not that kind of trust. Not major decision-making with no conferring.
You trust that he’s not going to sleep with a colleague on the business trip, lose his shirt in a casino, remortgage the house without your permission, keep a second family, leave you when you get old or take up bodybuilding and insist on working in Dubai (for the money). And you trust that when he says he was in the pub, he was. And when he doesn’t get home from work until 2am it was because it was a big day at the office, not a Bunga Bunga night.
You trust in all the smaller stuff too: that he’s going to remember to feed the dog and fill up the car, put the leftover chicken on a covered plate in the fridge (years of training) and take the washing out of the machine so that it doesn’t smell. You trust that you can rely on him to make sensible small decisions, taking your welfare into consideration where relevant, and you will sometimes be disappointed (“Did you not smell burning?” “Did you not think … it will be flooded, I’ll go round?”). That’s just how it goes.
But then genuine, abiding trust between a couple is based on the mutually agreed acceptance that there are many, many things that neither of you (mainly he) can be trusted to do without conferring, including most major purchases. He can buy a car, fine. You can’t go far wrong with a car but that’s pretty much it on the independent buying front, in our house anyway. He went off-grid to buy the smart TV and was robbed. He did not seek a second opinion on the turntable and now we have one with a belt drive he wasn’t aware of that isn’t hooked up correctly, which means you can’t turn it off.
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Buying any item of furniture is off-limits. He is liable to say, “That’s a nice chair” just when you were thinking “What the hell is that chair?” and the same goes for anything you want to put on display. Holiday booking without consultation is an absolute no. He once booked a place with a plastic swimming pool and no restaurant, miles from anywhere, and on our honeymoon we ended up in a hotel that had been open for an hour where nothing worked and we were the only guests.
Would I trust him to book a flight? No. Booking flights is a team job — one of you has to scan the small print for traps while the other one tries not to look up too many options lest it drive the price higher. As for property searching, once in a while he’ll send me a link to somewhere, for a laugh, tagged “Shall we move to Norfolk?” and it will look like a recently shut-down care home next to a trading estate.
And I’m one of the lucky ones. We all know women who have to specify their presents, right down to providing the website link, because their partners are incapable of choosing something that might vaguely appeal to their taste. There are plenty who can’t trust their partners not to drink too much in public, or say something alarmingly out of turn, or resist getting into a too-heated debate, or keep their hands to themselves. I don’t trust him to buy a rundown house in Devon, but I trust him not to goose the waitress. And surely trust means never having to say: “I’ve got something to tell you that you might not like, but it’s too late to do anything about it.”
Just a DJ changing his record
Tony Blackburn, the veteran radio DJ, may not be the incredible stud we had been led to believe, ever since we learnt from his Eighties autobiography that he had slept with more than 250 women. It’s a boast the 81-year-old regrets because his parents didn’t like it and he now says it was a figure plucked from nowhere. His co-author was worried there wasn’t enough sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in the book and “I don’t do drugs and I made up this number because I was fed up being asked about my personal life”, he says.
But on closer examination it seems that Blackburn is engaged in a bit of retrospective whitewashing. Look up excerpts from his 2007 follow-up autobiography, Poptastic!: My Life in Radio, and you find him proudly improving on the bedpost-notch figure: “When you tot it up, having 250-300 lovers over the course of 20 years only works out at something like a different partner every couple of months. (A hit rate that my club-owning friend Peter Stringfellow would probably regard as a complete disgrace.)” Oh, and he was addicted to prescription drugs too, which he nicked from his doctor father’s medicine cabinet. So bad luck, Tony, you were every bit the messy Seventies ladies’ man. Different times.
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Carol Midgley is away
