KEY POINTS:
Once upon a time there was a man called Philip, who was married to a woman called Emma, and their relationship was quite good, even when people tried to make jokes about Pip Emma, and even then it was still quite good, because who really remembers about Pip Emma any more?
So one night they were lying in bed and Emma was fast asleep, but Philip could not sleep because of the low, soft sound she was making, which he finally identified as snoring. This slightly shocked him. He had never heard her snoring before, and we are all shocked, are we not, when we find out something about our mate we did not know before, as it suggests either that we have been unobservant or that they have been holding out on us?
But, faced with the incontrovertible evidence that she was a secret snorer, Philip nudged her gently and said: "Darling, you're snoring." To soften the blow, he added: "Very softly, and quite musically, but still snoring."
She grunted, then turned over and went back to sleep. But Philip was not very surprised when she started snoring again, and, just as he was wondering how often you could justifiably wake up a snorer, he realised to his amazement that the snoring sound was not coming from his wife, but from somewhere else in the room. It was, in fact, he soon established, coming from the bedroom radio, which he had been listening to very softly when he went to sleep and had forgotten to turn off.
"Was I really snoring?" said his wife in the morning. "I've never done that before. And you are normally so hard to wake!"
None of us likes to lose an advantage in married life, even an illusory one, so Philip did not reveal the truth about the radio.
Instead he commiserated with her and said it did not matter - it was all part of life - realising at the same time that he had discovered one of the eternal verities, namely, that a person accused of snoring can never disprove it and you can thus accuse anyone of snoring with impunity.
He had cause to remember this a few weeks later when, in turn, she accused him of snoring.
"I don't snore!" he said.
"You did last night," she said.
"Perhaps you mistook it for something else," he said.
"What could you possibly mistake for snoring?" she scoffed.
It did not seem a good time to suggest that late-night radio sounded very similar, so Philip said nothing, but decided to run his own test.
He dug out an old cassette player, put it under his bed, and turned it on last thing before he fell asleep. He did not, of course, tell Emma.
"Was I snoring last night?" he said in the morning.
"I am afraid so," said Emma. "Quite loud. It got me up. Did you hear me moving around?"
"No," said Philip.
But when he played the tape back, there was no snoring from either of them. Hardly any sound at all, to begin with. Then, on the tape, he heard Emma get out of bed and come round to his side.
"Darling," she said. "Are you awake?"
Obviously not.
"Philip?" he could hear her saying. Then there was a pause. Then the dialling of a mobile phone, and the sound of her going out of the bedroom door. But before she got out of earshot, he heard her saying: "Darling! It's me, Emma!"
Strain as he might, and replay the tape as he undoubtedly did, he could hear nothing more of his wife's nocturnal conversation on the clandestine recording. But two things seemed to have been definitely established. One, neither he nor his wife snored. On the other hand, two, she was pretty definitely having an affair with someone called "darling" ...
* A reader writes: "Dear Mr Kington, I thought this was going to be a simple tale about snoring in marriage. It seems to be getting out of hand."
Miles Kington writes: "I thought it was going to be a small fable about snoring as well. If any reader would like to take it over and turn it into a novel, they're welcome."
Reader: "You're asking the reader to take over? That's a bit post-modern, isn't it?"
Miles Kington: "Yes."
- INDEPENDENT
