A happy sunlit strawberries and cream filled Friday evening... or so I thought!

“WELL,” my 83-year-old mother-in-law said sagely, after I confessed that I had come close to murdering her son with a hatchet twice in the same evening, “men are that bit different.”

Many men had a different way of thinking about things to women, she explained. For example, most men thought primarily about themselves.

Men, she observed, also tended to have different ways of looking at things than women – they generally looked at things in the way that best suited themselves.

It had been one of those weeks that wrung you out ’til you had no more drips left to be wrung.

Friday evening on the way home, I was so relieved the week was finally over I stopped in the shop and bought white wine, some cider for my son who was calling that evening for dinner, a big punnet of local strawberries and a tub of cream for dessert. I also bought a tub of posh ice-cream. I bought chocolate. Soleros & Magnums for the late evening. I. Bought. Really. Nice. Thoughtful. Stuff.

I struggled home through heavy traffic and finally plodded into the kitchen carrying several crammed shopping bags. Just as I was about to crash-land the groceries on the table, an outraged voice croaked: “Stop! No!”

My husband, who has been hospitalised with pneumonia and is home recovering, though still coughing and speaking in breathy whispers, had, it emerged, chosen this particular day to fully rise from his bed of pain.

The way he had decided to avoid going insane from illness, pain and boredom, was to re-do the top of the kitchen table. He gestured warily.

“You can’t put anything on that. It’s not dry yet.”

I looked around for somewhere to put the heavy bags, which by now were digging deep red rifts into my wrists. A worktop. Or the seat of a kitchen chair. But all the worktops and all the chairs were covered by tools and cans of varnish and pottery bowls and vases and other stuff that had been shifted from the kitchen table.

I went into the sitting room to dump my shopping bags on the surprisingly empty coffee table.

“No!” the voice gargled. “Leave that alone. I just did that one too.”

I looked around. The armchairs and sofa in the sitting room were heaped with tools, pottery and candles and other stuff from the coffee table.

I gritted my teeth, though I felt like throwing my head back and howling. I had a visitor coming, shopping to put away, dinner to prepare, a table to set, and the kitchen and sitting rooms had been virtually dismantled.

“Your problem,” my husband rasped, “is that you don’t appreciate stuff that you get done for free.”

I mentioned that I had had a long and difficult week and actually felt very close to just lying down on the floor.

He relented and began to unpack the bags onto the kitchen floor while I tried not to look.

Later, after tidying up the kitchen and sitting rooms as best I could, putting away the shopping, pulling a dinner together, lugging it outside along with the crockery, glasses, cutlery, water, wine bottle and cider, serving it, eating it, clearing it and dragging everything back indoors again to wash, there came another strangled gargle.

Where, the voice asked scratchily, was the blue thing for the nebuliser?

He was using the nebuliser three times a day and now he couldn’t find the little blue thing that made it work.

“What blue thing?” I asked, a bit nervously.

“Jaysus,” he coughed, “you should know what it looks like. You threw it into the rubbish bin last week.”

A cold feeling crawled down my spine.

“No way, Mam,” my son said. “Jeeze, you didn’t throw out the nebuliser thing again?”

The traitor had just necked a beautiful, two-course, mum-made dinner washed down with his favourite brand of artisan cider, selected and purchased by mum.

Where, I inquired carefully, had the blue nebuliser thing been left?

It had allegedly been very carefully placed in a mug on the worktop, or maybe a soup bowl or possibly some jug or other, in the middle of all the tools, the fruit bowls, the pottery and all the other stuff that had been lying in heaps every everywhere.

“I think I might have thrown it out when I was stacking the dishwasher,” I stuttered.

My husband put his head in his hands and gave a strangled croak.

Did I not understand that he had to take the nebuliser three times a day and that the nebuliser didn’t work without the blue plastic thing? That the nebuliser cost €100, and he’d only had it a fortnight and I’d now thrown the crucial blue bit out twice?

“For God’s sake, woman,” he rasped, “can’t you ever leave anything alone?”

We started with the recycling bin, which is where I’d apparently thrown the thing the last time I’d found it lying in an empty mug or whatever.

No joy. My husband’s breath was now coming in short gasps.

“Try the general bin,” I ordered, getting into a bit of a panic myself now.

This was not turning out to be anything like the happy sunlit-strawberries-and-cream Friday evening I’d envisaged.

No joy.

With nowhere to turn, I went on the offensive.

“It’s your own fault, leaving that thing lying around,” I said. “If it was so bloody all-important, you’d think you’d mind it a bit better.”

“Ah, Mam, in fairness now,” my son said sorrowfully. “you can’t start blaming Dad because you threw it out.”

As we sifted through all the rubbish for the second time round, my son began a long, sad story about how I’d spent his childhood sneaking around throwing out all his best stuff because it happened to be under a kitchen chair or lying in the middle of the floor.

He recollected how his friends had reported similar issues: every time one friend poured a glass of water, the glass had been emptied and put in the dishwasher by his mother before he’d had time to take a second swallow. That friend’s mother had always blamed his friend, too!

Backed into a corner by the twin blue male stares, I finally thought of the compost bin.

And there, thank God and all his small mercies, was the little blue nebuliser gadget sitting on top of a pile of eggshells.

Did they express any form of appreciation? My son sneered; my husband glared and went off coughing to soak it in Milton.

My mother-in-law chose to ring at that moment to see how her eldest son was - she generally rings me to find out the actual state of play because he always just says he’s fine.

I took the phone up to the bedroom and apologised for wanting to murder her eldest son with an axe. She was unfazed. It was the man/woman thing, she said.

“Find a glass jar with a lid,” she advised. “Stick a label on it with his name written in black marker and then it’ll be his responsibility.

“I always put my hearing-aid straight back into its container,” she added virtuously.

I went downstairs to find they had washed up, put all the rubbish back into the bins, and departed to the shed to complain to each other about me in peace.

I found the glass jar and a sticker and a black marker and went out to the patio. Then I necked the last of the white wine and listened to the birds.