Lucy Mangan: what Toryboy wants for Christmas

'I'm not doing it. I've told you. It's a depraved and unnatural act. Your appetites disgust me'
scotch egg
'You know what I want,' says Toryboy. 'You're my wife. You have to obey me.' Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian David Sillitoe/Guardian

'OK," I say, marching into the sitting room with the purposeful air I try to assume once a week in case it helps. "There are about seven nanoseconds before Christmas. Tell me what you want."

"You know what I want," says Toryboy, putting down his paper and the hamsters he has spent the morning idly skewering.

"I'm not doing it. I've told you."

"Why not?"

"Because it's a depraved and unnatural act, that's why not. Your appetites – and your feet, by the way – disgust me."

"But you're my wife. You have to obey me."

"Shut. Your face."

"Look, I have only three lifetime ambitions. And as you can get neither a fifth series of Battlestar Galactica nor a lifesize replica of HMS Victory commissioned, you might at least give the other one a try."

"I am not," I say wearily and for at least the 17th time in three years, "making you the world's largest scotch egg."

"But why not?"

"I really don't think an explanation's necessary."

"You buy an ostrich egg…"

"That's your opening sentence and you still ask, 'Why not?'"

"You. Shut your face. You can buy ostrich eggs in Waitrose these days. Or someone will have one on the internet, anyway. Bound to. Then you wrap it lovingly in sausagemeat – about three pounds should do it. Maybe four, as it's Christmas. And then you coat it in breadcrumbs and deep-fry it. Couldn't be simpler."


"But I've felt the blood just flying through my arteries lately. They're not used to it. It can't be good for me."

"How can it not be good for you?"

"Be-cause," he says kindly, as if talking to an idiot, "my arteries are used to gentler handling. A less pressurised flow, a more refined pace. So the walls will naturally be weaker and unprepared for such a sustained and brutal attack from within. In fact, I'm doing very well not to have a burst aneurysm as we speak."

"Aren't we all. Look, just forget about the scotch egg, would you?"

"All right then. How about…"

"And the whole-pig sausage roll."

"But you just get a pig and…"

"Wrap it in pastry. I know. I know."

"It doesn't even have breadcrumbs!"

"Take the answer to your previous request, wrap that in pastry and…"

"Fine. I'll have some books."

"We said no books this year."

"What? Why?"

"Because we've started having to store them under the cot. Most of your naval history and classic fiction is there. The legs don't touch the ground properly now. It's not safe."

"I was simply making tangible the uplifting power of the written word. The baby's very literal, I find."

"No more books."

"Can I have a clavichord?"


"Then books or a meat-clad egg it must be."

A Googling later and it is clear each one of his nominations breaches the £2.99 limit I have set on anyone who made me give birth this year. I sigh. Wrapping an egg is going to be skiddily difficult. Let's hope the breadcrumbs give it traction. I comfort myself with the thought that a clavichord would be worse.