Solutions to missing him

He's been gone almost a week now and I'm not warming to this tour idea one bit. Sure, I can starfish to my heart's content at night, and I don't have to defend my meals against endless snatch offensives once he's finished eating. The bathroom floor isn't swimming 3 inches deep in stagnant shower water, and my book collection remains on the bookshelves and not stacked next to the toilet collecting fluff and errant drops of pee, but God I miss him. I miss how he aims the shower head to point directly out of the cubicle when I turn it on in the morning, I miss his discarded socks in the hall, and the way he wakes up and kisses me when even I can't bear to be in the same room as my breath.

The spiders have heard he's out of town and are buying up real-estate faster than I can change the hoover bag. The bed is sodding freezing. I'm restricted to about two movies that don't make me cry, and I have to vet my music for themes of war and solitude. I have to carry heavy shopping home for miles and all the best Waitrose meals are made for two. Life is laughing at my predicament. To rub salt into a gaping wound, the neighbours upstairs have traded their mattress for a set of rusty springs and an amplifier. I hate them.

But they say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I don't believe for a minute that this can be solely attested to the notion that the less time you spend with a person, the smaller the chance you have of discovering that they bite their toenails and worship Will Ferrell. There has to be something that we all enjoy doing while our partners are away, some single-person throwback that remembers how good it was not to have to remove every. single. little. hair growing anywhere except our heads EVERY morning. I mean, it's 7am, you can't even remember your own name and there you are, wielding a razor in a slippery shower so he can marvel at how smooth your underarms are! That stops right now - another reason to be thankful for a winter tour.

Okay, I'd aimed for a rant here, a list of forbidden pleasures that would make it all worth while, but alas I'm stuck at one. Like most things in life, this would be so much easier if I were a man. I could wax lyrical for hours about the joys of burping, farting, scratching my balls and leaving the toilet seat up without fear of admonishment. But nope. We women have shaving and precious little else. So it seems that the answer to the problem of missing him is simple; he needs to step up to my level of nagging so I can at least enjoy the freedom to rebel next time he goes away.