etween three and six on a Sunday afternoon is peak ‘hypothetical’ time in our household. The sitting-room floor is scattered with newspaper inserts advertising ‘comfort-waist jeans’ and ‘non-slip bath safety stickers’ – both of which my husband will soon be needing – there are coffee rings on every surface, a batch of botched flapjacks on the table, and I’m slipping into the bored/tetchy mood that’s a ghostly remnant of all those Sundays spent as a schoolgirl deferring homework until after The Wonder Years.
‘So if I left you for someone else,’ I begin, eyes still on the telly, where Annette Bening is confronting Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right, ‘would it make it better or worse if it were for a woman?’
Putting his teacup down just beside a coaster, my husband passes a hand wearily over his face. ‘Are you planning on leaving me for a woman?’ ‘No.’ ‘So this is like the time you asked me whether if we adopted a child, would I be able to love it like one of my own?
Celia and Piers in London in 2009CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
Whether I would marry again if you died – oh, and my personal favourite: if I could be invisible, who would I watch taking a shower?’ Well, when he puts it like that it makes me sound unhinged.
I like hypotheticals as much as the next woman, but unlike some girls I know I’ve never asked him where he would hole up if a zombie plague were to take hold of the City of London, whether he would want to know if he were actually a robot, or which superpower he would pick if he could have one.
A good, plump, juicy hypothetical needs to be titillating. And titillating is all that they are. Eavesdrop on two women in the pub and they’ll unleash a wild hypothetical every 15 minutes, which is how I know exactly who would be my second husband (and what would be a respectful time frame after my current husband’s tragic demise), which street I would live on in Barcelona, and why I’d be happier living out my days there, bald, than at home, afflicted by acute facial eczema.
A good, plump, juicy hypothetical needs to be titillating
These are the basic three Ps: prior planning and preparation. I wasn’t trying to catch my husband out when I asked him which of my friends he would sleep with if given a hall pass, but I will admit to being surprised by his answer.
Celia and Piers attend the Help Haiti Home Gala in California CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
I mean I love the girl to bits, but really? With those cankles? Now that I’ve thought about it, it’s probably the thinking aloud aspect of hypotheticals – the extravagant mind doodles writ large in thin air – that drives linear-minded men mad.
I wasn’t trying to catch him out when I asked him which of my friends he would sleep with if given a hall pass
‘It’s just that it’s always when we’re enjoying a nice stretch of silence that you’ll come out with, “If you had to wear one outfit for the rest of your life, which one would it be?”’ groans my husband.
‘I suppose I just find trying to fill a void with idle, gossipy chit-chat fairly pointless.’ And with that, he gets back to his Twitter feed.
