I stopped talking to my wife when she told me she’d thrown out my drawing board

Tim Dowling: it’s day two of the silent treatment. Can I keep it up?

I am not speaking to my wife, although I concede she has no real way of knowing this. I’m in my office shed, working and not speaking to her, and she’s inside, oblivious.

I have not been speaking to her since she paid someone to come and take away the junk stacked under the covered bit of our side return: an old shelving unit, a couple of redundant light fittings, a broken chair, a dismantled pallet and my drawing board.

We brought the drawing board in off the street 30 years ago, and carried it home. I put it up in a corner of the bedroom and used it to draw cartoons and illustrations. You could say that’s how I made my living back then, except I didn’t quite. At some point, I decided it was better to be a failed writer than a failed cartoonist, because the overheads were lower.

I hung on to the drawing board, but when we moved house there didn’t seem to be any space for it. My shed was too small. I can see what my wife thought: if it’s been sitting outside for two years, he can’t have missed it. But I missed it every day. Whenever I walked by it, I renewed my plan to smuggle it into the house. When my wife told me it was gone, I found myself close to tears. Over the course of the afternoon I experienced a cascade of complex, competing emotions.

Fortunately, I’ve discovered that there are no emotions that cannot be converted, for simplicity’s sake, into anger. I seethed for a while, but seething is a lot of work if no one is around to watch. Eventually, I fell silent.

On Friday, the second day of not talking to my wife, I find myself sitting across the table from my oldest son, who is staring at his laptop. My wife walks in.

“Are you here for supper?” she says to the oldest one.

“I think so,” he says.

“Decide,” she says. “We’re eating early, and then Dad and I are watching another film.”

“What film?” the oldest says.

“We have a choice,” she says, offering me two options. I look out the window and shrug.

“Wait,” she says. “Are you still not speaking?” I shake my head ruefully, while staring at my hands.

“Not speaking about what?” the oldest says.

“Because I threw away his stupid drawing board,” my wife says. “How long is this meant to go on for?”

“I suppose it will always be there, hanging between us,” I say. I think: stop talking! The oldest one snorts.

“Don’t you laugh,” my wife says. “I got rid of all your stuff as well.”

By 8pm, my wife and I are halfway through our movie, part of our January festival of film and not drinking. Some of the films are on TV anyway, some are streamed and some, like this one, are on actual DVDs. As I sit brooding in the dark, the main character gets shot and the screen goes black. A minute later, it is still black.

“Is this part of it?” my wife says. I shrug, but she can’t see.

“I think it’s just our crappy DVD player,” I say, finally.

My wife has accidentally filled the garden with vermin | Tim Dowling Read more

“What do we do?” she says. Normally, I would just shout upstairs for someone to come and fix it, but all the children are out. It’s our technological problem. I stare at the stack of black boxes beneath the TV.

“Theoretically, it should be possible to play a DVD through that games console,” I say.

“Do it, then,” my wife says.

“I can’t even turn it on,” I say. “There are no buttons.” The console has a perfectly blank facade, like a scale model of an evil empire’s corporate HQ. I poke random spots until a light flashes and a DVD tray slides out.

“OK,” I say.

My wife and I spend 15 minutes crouching on the floor, forehead to forehead, trying different configurations of wires. Eventually we get the console connected to the screen, and I manage to navigate to the shooting scene using a joystick. The film continues.

“Well done,” my wife says. “I would have given up.”

I take my seat in the dark and think: back to the drawing board.