IT’S all because of these flirting celebs. If Mrs X hadn’t seen something in the paper about footballer Ashley Cole and TV presenter Vernon Kay using their mobiles for hanky-panky, she wouldn’t have even thought of checking mine.
She is so fly. During the break in Corrie, she sent me off to make a cuppa. That was just an excuse to rifle through my sent texts.
“Ah-ha. What’s this?” I heard her bellow, just as I was reaching for the Gypsy Creams.
She had found a very suspicious sent message as she frantically stabbed the buttons on my Samsung before we resumed our peek into the traumas of Gail Platt’s life.
The text said: “Mines a huge 1.” No surprise there, you wouldn’t have thought. Just one problem. I hadn’t sent it to her.
Call me
She hit the proverbial roof. “Whose mobile number is this?” she raged.
Before I could even stutter, she wanted me to divulge which trollop I had decided to impress with this short and, she roared, fictional literary masterpiece.
She made up her mind there and then. This was all the proof necessary for the divorce courts. That one text was all she needed to demonstrate to the sheriff that I was capable of boasting in a most unseemly way to one of the trio of floozies I had gallivanted out to lunch with last week. But which one was the recipient?
Neen? Quite possibly, she thought. Ann Ross from the council? Probably. She looked a right feisty one, she decided.
Who was the third one, she demanded. Only Gaelic radio’s answer to Loose Women, I announced.
“No. Not . . . not that Seonag Monk woman? I should have known.”
I thought she might be impressed that I moved in such glitzy showbiz circles. But no. She was now absolutely convinced I was at it, whatever “at it” means.
Not that I am suggesting any looseness on Seonag’s part, you understand. It is just that she is on the radio in the mid-afternoon when ITV2 repeats the earlier midday showing of Loose Women.
I have recently learned from ladies who lunch that it is that second showing which so many of them like to settle down to with a cup of green tea in one hand and a ginger nut in the other. Except when Seonag is on the radio, obviously.
My life was unravelling before me. It was made clear I had been caught texting dirty, so I was for the high jump. It was only a matter of time, she said, until she had the finest legal brains above the Lloyds TSB on Francis Street forensically going through my communications for the last 14 years and she would be taking half the house, half the car and half the dog. Ugh, is that why they say divorces can be so messy?
Unfortunately for Mrs X and her plan, I had not sent that message to any of my elegant dining companions at the Eleven restaurant.
Would she believe the truth? Hadn’t a clue. I did think of making up a yarn to explain it away. I would say I was walking on the beach with the dog and I had come across an old wartime mine.
I had phoned bomb disposal and they said they were on the way but to text them with any updates.
And that, my darling, was why I sent: “Mines a huge 1.”
Even if she can be a bit gullible at times, there is no way even she would swallow that one.
It was time to come clean. Confession is good for the soul and all that.
So I told her how I had actually sent that message to the well-coiffured, devil-may-care, man-about-town Mr George Gawk. She looked thunderstruck.
Then she quickly wished me and George all the very best and hoped we would be very happy in our new life together.
If she got an invitation to our civil partnership ceremony, she assured me that we could even keep both halves of the dog. Aw, that’s nice. She’s so sweet.
What am I saying? No. You don’t understand. Me and George are not like that. Not that way. No. That text was not one of an intimate nature. It was a drinks order.
We had been due to meet in one of the very few pubs that George is not currently barred from. He had texted me: “I’ll get you a wee rum if I get there first.”
When George is buying, the rums are always very wee. So I responded, because it was chilly without, that I would prefer a double serving of demerara. Which is why I had used the words: “Mines a huge 1.”
So it was actually a request, not a statement of fact. It looks worse because with texts there is no room for explanation. You have to write it the shortest way.
Like Sarah Brown, the PM’s wife. When she writes in texts and on Twitter, she always refers affectionately to her DH. That was a bit puzzling. DH? Was she making waves with David Hasselhoff? Or moping for Douglas Hogg, the Tory MP accused of claiming expenses for cleaning his moat? None of them. DH is her way of referring to her darling husband. Yeuch.
If it had been an e-mail, I would probably have put: “Dear, sweet Mr Campbell, thank you so much for your very kind invitation asking me to join you for a snifter. Remember, a’ Sheòrais, you are in the chair this time. Because of the inclement weather conditions, I would be supremely grateful if you would make mine as large as you like. Come on, George, you tight-fisted Bacach. It is about time you put your hand in your pocket. With my very best wishes and my fondest love. Iain.”
Just kidding, of course. There is no way I would put in that last bit. I would just stop at fondest love.
