Things my girlfriend and I have argued about (online version)

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I was watching Mission Impossible and it was making me uneasy. Tom Cruise was doing something — infiltrating, probably, you know what he's like — and he was continuously describing the situation to his distant support buddies via his headset radio. For a while, I naturally assumed that it was simply Tom Cruise's big nose that was unsettling me and tried, using soothing visualisations and breathing exercises, to move myself, mentally, to a place where it wasn't an issue. But then — the realisation freezing my arm and abruptly halting a crisp's journey from bag to mouth — I had a small epiphany: 'Lawks,' I thought, 'This is my girlfriend.'

"Margret, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to wander around constantly articulating precisely what it is that you're doing at that moment, as though relaying it to an unseen control team somewhere. Possibly, on an alien mother ship, secretly orbiting the Earth. For example."

She does this all the time. 'Get some eggs from the fridge… here's the butter… and now a frying pan… What's in the cupboard? OK, we've got oregano… some basil… I'll go for the mixed herbs… Now I need some scissors…' Who is she talking to? It's certainly not me: for one thing, I can see what she's doing — and, further, am not interested — and for another, I sometimes hear her doing this while she's alone in a room in another part of the house. And — though, admittedly, there's often a huge temptation to think she functions like this — I don't believe it's because she simply has no idea what she's going to do until it's actually occurring and I'm merely listening to her keeping her mind informed about what it is that her body appears to be doing right now. Sometimes we'll be sitting down watching TV and she'll get up and say, 'I'm going to the toilet.' Why would anyone say that? Does she think I'm keeping a log for research purposes? Is she intimating that she needs help? Does she have reason to expect that she may be abducted halfway up the stairs and thus wants me to at least be able to tell the police, 'Well, the last time I saw her I know she was on her way to the toilet.' What?

Surely, it can only be that she's an undercover member of the M.I. team. Every time a van is parked near our house now, I imagine Ving Rhames is in it; 'OK, the toilet's at the top of the stairs — it's unguarded, but has a slightly bent hinge…'

Oh, and the first person to say, 'Well, if she's doing an impossible mission, then that'd be 'living with you' , Mil, wouldn't it?' gets a very slow handclap, OK?