Jenny wants to know what I’m doing and I tell her calmly that I’m making an arrabbiata sauce and that I’m going to add some lemon juice to lift the flavour, to provide a touch of acidity to counterbalance the sweetness of the sugar just in case I add too much. She informs me that I always add too much sugar. This is true and yet I don’t feel ready to admit as much. I ask her to put on the penne. She sighs as if I have asked her to perform a difficult task.

A drink with Jerome for old times’ sake, well what do you know? I shake crumbs from an empty bread wrapper into the bin. I wipe the counter with a damp tea towel. Jenny fills the kettle with water and sets it to boil. I listen to the radio and the music isn’t particularly good and I switch to Arena and there’s a poet reading from her latest collection and her voice is grating and northern Irish and I have no surrender stupidly in my mind.

Stop, did you say that we have fish fingers? I say.

She tells me that she doesn’t know if we have fish fingers but that the last time she looked for them in the freezer she couldn’t see any. I open the freezer and shove my hand into the top drawer where we keep the ice. I pull out a box that calls itself fish fingers but there’s no mention of cod and I feel my familiar fear of pollock and dogfish.

Why did you buy this cheap shit? I ask. My eyes are on her and she looks like she’s afraid of me.

I don’t know, they were good value I guess, she says.

There comes a time when you begin to equate your situation in life in terms of nature. This development comes from growing older and it seems to have little to do with anything else. If things aren’t going well you think about things like natural disasters or earthquakes or tsunamis, basically general shit that shouldn’t happen but just does. Not things like mass murders – lone gunmen shooting indiscriminately. A cosmic plate shifting in on itself on its own people, and for that I blame God. God and his way and his own problems turning into my problems.

This fish finger problem isn’t like this.

I bought them because they were on special offer, she says.

If God could see me now getting all heavy and bolshie with my wife. I’m not in the habit of eating cheap shit. We’re not poor, I yell.