It’s Mother’s Day, and I have returned with the shopping. I’ve left a selection of cards halfway up the stairs for the boys to sign when they wake up. My wife has unwrapped the perfume she bought for herself on my behalf, and seems very taken with it.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
The only problem is lunch: when my wife made the shopping list, she just wrote “vegetable”, allowing me scope to use my own initiative. But I found nothing to inspire me at the supermarket.
“You bought a huge cauliflower,” my wife says, extracting it from the bag.
“Sorry,” I say. “I suffered a failure of imagination.”
“What were you planning to do with it?” she asks.
“Me?” I say.
“Were you going to make cauliflower cheese?” she asks. “I love cauliflower cheese!”
“I don’t even know what that is,” I lie.
“I’ll find you a recipe, shall I?” she says.
The oldest one appears, having returned from university the previous day, in the company of all his stuff. “What’s happening?” he asks.
“Did you see the cards?” I say.
“Dad is making me cauliflower cheese for Mother’s Day!” my wife says, waving a cookery book over her head.
“No, I’m not,” I say.
The truth is, I object to cauliflower cheese on principle. It’s one of those weird English privations – comfort food for people who get nostalgic about discomfort.
“Here you are,” my wife says, sliding the open book under my nose and backing away. I look down at the recipe. To my dismay, we seem to have all the ingredients.
“The war is over,” I say. “Let’s have peas.” But no one hears me; I’m alone in the kitchen with a large cauliflower. I sit down with a knife and reluctantly set about dissecting it. Half an hour later, the cauliflower cheese is more or less assembled.
My wife comes back into the kitchen. “It’s going to be delicious!” she says, beaming.
“I very much doubt that,” I say. Until now, I’d been looking forward to it going wrong, but it turns out cauliflower cheese isn’t that hard to make.
“Did you put breadcrumbs on top?” she asks.
“I did, yeah,” I say. “It said to.”
“Oh my God!” she says, clapping her hands. It occurs to me how rarely I find it in my power to make my wife this happy. Maybe, I think, you should go with it: shut up, and acquiesce.
We have guests for lunch. My wife’s excitement about the cauliflower cheese proves infectious. I think: what is it with these people? It’s a white vegetable, with white stuff on it. But I keep quiet.
“I love this cauliflower!” one of the guests says. “What’s your secret?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I put some cumin in it, to celebrate the end of rationing, but otherwise…”
“I’m having more!” my wife says.
After our guests leave, my wife suggests we watch a film together.
“Really?” I say. Ever since we got the box that houses the entire history of cinema, we haven’t been able to agree on anything. We sit side by side with a blanket over our legs, while my wife flicks through hundreds of options.
“What about this one?” she asks. “Have you seen it?”
“A million times,” I say.
“You pick then.”
“No,” I say, thinking again about the power of acquiescence. “Let’s watch what you want to watch.”
“Really?” she says. I nod. She pushes Play. Her phone rings. She stands up to answer it, and then leaves the room.
When I wake up two hours later, the film is nearly over, and I am alone in the dark.
• Follow Tim on Twitter.
