On days when she’s working,
have the house to myself.
No excuses for shirking,
Get those books off the shelf.

I like peace and quiet,
When I’m doing my thing.
Concentration Required,
For lots of reading.

But when in the house,
I feel I’m fair game,
My incredible spouse,
Just serves to inflame.

I feel myself raging, from within,
As my wife sees me and comes in to chat,
Or I hear her music – an unholy din,
This is something I need to work at.

Okay, I want to explain the poem but straight from the off, I want to say that I understand that this is my problem, it is for me to get my head around, not my wife. I’m not complaining.

As regular readers will know, my wife is a nurse. She works in a doctor’s surgery. So, she has this tidy demarcation – the surgery is “work”, and home is, well “home”. Her space to relax.

For many years, I was the same. “Work” was my office in London, home was “relax”.

In my case, my work required a lot of concentration. It probably says something in the blurb, but my main role was designing computer systems in the finance sector. Yada, yada (wasn’t that a prompt for something the other day?), dull as, but the bottom line, it required a nice, dark room, and plenty of quiet.

Having got back after the stroke (I am too young to consider myself retired, I still want to work), I’ve been building my professional skills once again. I do this from home. Even though I’m no longer working for banks, so the projects I do now are far less grand, I still appreciate that quiet.

So, I’m in a tricky situation. Ideally, I want the place to be silent, but this is my wife’s home, too. Her “relax” space. What’s more, she is the main breadwinner at the moment, her income never used to be important but now, it keeps us afloat.

So I can’t say anything, I have to bite my tongue. When I hear the loud music, I suck it up. When she comes into my workspace on her day off and starts chatting to me, breaking my concentration, I suck it up. But inside, there is this silent “Grrrr”.

Anyway, that’s about as “peeve” as it gets.

Oh, and there was a din in the poem somewhere, to fulfil Fandangs’s One Word Challenge (FOWC).