Restaurant

My partner has bought a wood. Seriously, he has. He simply came home one day and said, ‘I have something to tell you.’ Oh good, I thought, he’s leaving me. Now at last I can get on with my life. ‘I’ve bought a wood,’ he said. My partner likes the outdoor life and camping. He’ll often go off for a few days, big rucksack and frying-pan bouncing off his back. I tried camping with him once but ended up sitting in the car for two days with the heater on, crying and wishing I was in John Lewis. I guess I am more the indoorsy type.

He has, it turns out, bought four acres of beech and oak in the Chilterns, Buckinghamshire. Would I like to visit it? ‘You bet!’ I lie. It is always a testing moment when a gentleman shows a lady his wood, but it is a very nice wood, full of wood, with a view over wheatfields. ‘Couldn’t you look at the view forever?’ he says. ‘Yes,’ I lie, even though I don’t really get it; am thinking: ‘But you’ve seen it now, love. Move on.’ He will, I know, be happy camping here with his axe and his saw and his bivvy bag and his storm kettle and all those dry things that will get wet and then will never get dry again, because that is what camping is like. (You can tell this, even from a heated car.) You may ask, in the light of all this, what has kept us together all these years, especially as the sex isn’t that great. I think it’s because he respects my interests while I respect his, or at least I would do if only they were more interesting and involved a lot more shopping.

Anyway, we mooch around his wood for a bit, during which I am keen to appear enthusiastic: ‘Oh, look, a beech, darling.