Saturday afternoon and I'm watching 27 Dresses with Daughter Number Two.
Yes, the Katherine Heigl romcom. J and Daughter Number One are off seeing Selma. But as much as I love and admire Martin Luther King [1] I don't want to watch a movie about white men beating up black men and women. So Katherine Heigl singing Benny and the Jets on top of a bar it is. [2]
I love romcoms. Even the terrible ones. Even 27 Dresses with Katherine Heigl. J likes war movies and reading about Nazis. I think the only romcom that has ever met her approval is When Harry Met Sally. So if she's flicking through the channels she'll stop and watch anything about Auschwitz or Stalingrad or the Nuremburg trials. Me, I'll flick and flick and end up catching the last half hour of Clueless. [3] Again.
A few weeks ago (500) Days of Summer was on Film 4. Even though I've never really taken to Zoey Deschanel's manic dream pixie girl thing I always watch it. For the music. For the idea of having a tattoo of a cityscape on my arm (every time I see that scene I'm so tempted). For the bit near the end when the screen is split between Joseph Gordon-Levitt's expectations and the reality.
This time it was the 500 days thing that stuck in my head. It got me thinking. How many days have I spent with J over the years?
So I worked it out.
"How many days do you think we've known each other?" I ask her when I finish my calculations the next day.
"I don't know."
"12,029 I reckon. Or 11,089 if you want to take it from our first date."
"Oh, really," she says and turns back to her book about the Ribbentrop pact or something. She doesn't seem impressed by my calculation. "I even looked up how many leap years there have been since 1982," I say plaintively.
"Hmm."
I am hurt she isn't bowled over by this romantic gesture. It is a romantic gesture, isn't it? Wasting your time to come up with a figure that possibly reminds your best beloved how much time she has wasted on your less-than-worthy self. I sulk for a bit.
A few days later I ask her a question. "What is the most romantic thing I've ever done then?"
"Taking me to Hazlitt's Hotel in London that time was nice."
"Oh, yes. The hotel in Soho. The really, really expensive hotel in Soho."
"That's the one."
There's my problem in a nutshell. I've been working on the wrong figures. I jump on TripAdvisor. What's on at the Imperial War Museum at the moment anyway?
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