I’m Tristram, known to all my friends as Tristram, I don’t answer to anything else. I’m a thirty-eight year old chemical engineer, and have been married to Melissa for fifteen years. Melissa is a chartered accountant and couple of years younger than I. We have four children between thirteen and seven. We have a busy family life and enjoy camping and other out door activities during the weekends and school holidays with the children. I write speculative fiction and Melissa sings and plays the mandolin. We are both only children and our parent’s enjoy being grandparents which does provide us with occasional opportunity for social events without the children.

I’ve always been fairly laid back concerning politics and social matters and initially considered Melissa to be similar, however nothing could have been more true and simultaneously further from the truth. Melissa and I are both atheists who are happy to allow others to believe what they will, we just don’t want to have our time wasted by having to listen to any of it. If folk wish to believe fantasy that’s fine, but there’s no need to waste our time justifying it. Politically our views all occupy the centre ground. However, I’ll explain the apparent contradiction concerning Melissa. When left alone she is pretty much like myself, laid back and liberal. That's liberal in the literal European sense NOT the US sense. However, she refrains, mostly due a lack of interest but also from a belief it is bad mannered, from proselytising all and any of her views. By the same token she gets irritated by anyone who insists on trying to convert her to their religion, politics, social view or whatever. She will politely tell such a person she is not interested and would like to discuss something else, anything else. If that is not mutually acceptable she’s quite happy to say she’s willing to leave. If the idiot persists then all restraints are off and she feels free to be as bad mannered and offensive to the enemy as the enemy is being to her. She maintains, “I am not a child in need of guidance or correction.”

I recall a party we went to a few years ago. It was a new year’s eve party in the reception rooms at a local pub threwn by someone I had known for years and his wife who was a warder at the local remand centre: Risley for those who know where I mean. Risley was a remand centre then, not a prison, so that dates the tale. A lot of her friends were there and many of them were lesbians. Someone being a lesbian or anything else for that matter is of no concern to Melissa or me, for it’s none of our business. Melissa was chatting, about baking apple pie it subsequently turned out, to a devastatingly pretty blonde of about five foot eleven without her heels when she was accosted by said blonde’s partner, a solid looking brunette of about five foot six. Now I wouldn’t dream of saying anything, but I am entitled to my thoughts. Everyone is entitled to be ugly, but that brunette was definitely abusing the privilege. The brunette was clearly rattled and becoming defensive concerning her ‘property’, an attitude unacceptable to Melissa and I, but it was not up to either of us to say or do anything about it. After a particularly offensive remark from the Brunette, Melissa smiled and said, “You seem to be under a misapprehension. I play the oboe not the flute,” turned and left. The blonde broke out in peals of laughter and took her partner away clearly explaining as they left.

Not long after that I was cornered by some woman who maintained that Melissa and I were giving our children an unfair advantage over those of the working classes because our children had books to read in the house. I was going to ignore it and walk away but Melissa, who was nearby, was having none of it. “If my husband chooses to spend his money investing in the education of his children instead of pissing every penny he earns up against a wall that is his choice. His choice not yours. It’s a major reason why I married him and you madam are so full of shit that when you die we shall give you an enema and bury you in a shoebox.” Melissa doesn’t often use language like that, but when she does it is always effective, and that I suppose is a major reason why I married her.

That party was certainly one we both remember after all these years. Melissa had later been cornered by a hard line feminist who despite Melissa’s warnings had continued to preach. The room went silent towards the end of the confrontation and all in it heard Melissa say, “True equality will occur when my husband and I can decide for ourselves which one of us works and for how long in order to keep a roof over our heads, our children fed and clothed and body and soul together instead of both of us having to work every hour available to do so. You pontificating concerning me dumping my husband and going out to find myself as a true woman is no better than than some man telling me I should stay at home and have babies, cook, clean and look after my man, both of which would incidentally scar my children psychologically and put us all close to the breadline. How I live is a matter of choice, our choice, not mine and certainly not yours. I don’t need some left wing, tree hugging social do gooder of a player of the pink mouth organ telling me how to be a woman real or otherwise.”

At another party Melissa had been prosed on at for some time by someone she described as the archetypal male chauvinist pig concerning women’s poor driving and in particular their poor parking skills. Eventually Melissa considered it was her turn. “Two major differences between women and men lie in their multi-tasking and their spacial visualisation abilities. The evidence conclusively shews that in general women are better at multi-tasking and men are better at tasks requiring spacial visualisation. Your contention that women can’t park could possibly be true and those proven differences could provide the explanation why. However, I have an alternative theory to offer.”

I started to cringe because I recognised the signs, Melissa was about to deliver the coup de grace.

“It’s not a matter of perception as much as a matter of faulty measuring. All their lives those of the concave persuasion have been told, particularly by those of the convex persuasion like you that,” Melissa held up her right hand with her fore finger and thumb separated as if indicating a separation or size, “that that is nine inches.” She smiled sweetly and before turning to leave a crowd of folk roaring with laughter, men as well as women, behind her added, “I’ve been told the same too probably because I transitioned before the age of two.”