Anyone walking into our kitchen right now would be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled into the home of Mary Berry or Kirstie Allsopp.
The table is strewn with the ingredients for elaborate Christmas puddings and I keep tripping over various bits of foliage waiting to be woven into an oversized door wreath.
In the midst of it all is my husband John, engrossed in the ‘Your Homemade Christmas’ videos he’s found on YouTube.
‘You do realise you can buy these things ready-made from M&S,’ I’ve told him.
He says he does – which is why he’s going to this much trouble in the first place.
‘When people come round they’ll appreciate my efforts,’ says John. ‘Then they’ll go home feeling completely inadequate… and I’ll be the winner of Christmas 2024!’
Ugh. Is there anything less attractive than a man who turns every social interaction into a competition – that he inevitably wins?
Back in March, John took redundancy from his senior role at a Fortune 500 company at the age of 60. He cashed in his company pension, paid everything off, allowing him to ‘stop working and start living’.
Since being made redundant, Kate Johnson’s husband has turned his attention to domesticity – seemingly desperate to outdo friends, family and neighbours at every turn (posed by a model)
He went from being a big cheese with dozens of employees beneath him to, well, being at home with far too much time on his hands. And it’s dawning on me now just how much his career must have spared me from the highly competitive part of his personality.
Desperate for a new outlet for his focus and drive, he has turned his attention to domesticity – seemingly desperate to outdo our friends, family and neighbours at every turn.
Whenever my friends pop round for coffee, he’s more interested in showing off about his high-spec new Audi than actually listening to them. And when he offers biscuits, he points out they’re from Waitrose.
In fact my friends and I have taken to secretly calling him Hyacinth Bucket, after the snobbish 1990s sitcom character forever trying to impress friends and neighbours.
To think I was thrilled when John first retired. We talked about buying a caravan and turning every weekend into a long one, and I planned to reduce my own hours at the dental practice where I work as a receptionist so we could spend more time together. Those plans have been shelved.
Kate and her friends are now secretly calling her husband Hyacinth Bucket, after the snobbish 1990s sitcom character (pictured) who is forever trying to impress friends and neighbours
At first, John’s presence around the house was pleasant, unassuming even. But then I suggested he help our daughter Kirsty by taking our six-year-old grandson, Teddy, to school the odd morning and his old competitive spirit was re-activated by the tiger mums at the school gate.
I didn’t think much of it when he started mentioning the names of pushy parents Kirsty had complained to me about – the types dressed for a catwalk, who bragged about their children’s reading prowess.
But alarm bells rang when John sent Teddy home with a freezer bag filled with the cheesy chicken nuggets he’d made from scratch, courtesy of a Nigella recipe… plus a note reeling off the additives in the ones Kirsty gets from Aldi.
Then he insisted we host Teddy’s next birthday party, ‘so the other mums can see how it’s done’. He planned a bouncy castle, magician and even an ice-cream van. Thankfully, Kirsty put her foot down.
John wasn’t a corporate boss any more, but he still found ways to show the rest of us a thing or two. Never one for housework or cooking, boredom turned our home into a new territory for him to conquer.
Last summer, he started growing fancy dahlias – all so he could ‘rub old Frank’s nose’ in the fact that he’d been outdone by a novice. Old Frank being the 80-something widower next door who grows huge flowers that could win prizes, but in fact he just gives them away since his wife died.
I was so incensed by John’s motives that I’ve been secretly depositing slugs on his fledgling plants as sabotage.
Meanwhile, that retirement caravan I’d pictured no longer cuts the mustard. John’s now after a seaside cottage – and plans to fund a portion of the cost by charging our friends and relatives to stay in it.
Even Patch, our scruffy, much-loved nine-year-old rescue mutt, isn’t safe. John has said when Patch dies he wants us to get something ‘a bit more middle class’ like a cockapoo.
Last Sunday he even told his 87-year-old mother that her standards were slipping after she cooked us a roast with gravy made from granules.
She made the whole meal while leaning on a stick. She didn’t react, but I bet she felt like hitting him with it.
I’m far less reticent, and tell John what a pain he’s being on a regular basis. But he just shrugs it off. The thing is, just like Hyacinth’s long-suffering husband Richard, I still love John to bits.
And so, I keep telling myself that he’s not yet adjusted to this new pace of life. That things will get better, and he’ll stop being so obnoxious. Let’s hope I’m not kidding myself.
- Kate Johnson is a pseudonym. Names have been changed