Breaking Up is Easy To Do.

An excerpt from Mrs Pither's diary.

Woman, thy name is destruction. Well, if it isn't, it is certainly my Soon-To-Be Ex-Wife's middle name.
She Who Breaks Things has been working from home today. The bill has run into hundreds of pounds. Not the bill for her services, I hasten to add, but the bill for all the damage she has caused around Pither Towers!
The Time limited Mrs P has a special gift - she only has to look at things and they break. Couple that with her lightness of touch (which is akin to a gorilla with PMT), her insistence on running instead of walking and her knowledge of things technical (which makes a brain damaged mollusc seem like Prof. Stephen Hawking), then her ability to destroy becomes rivalled only by God.
Her first target this morning was the computer. MY STB EW was, apparently, taught to type by Keith Moon. She bashes the keyboard so hard it makes you wince. When her fingers eventually break under the strain she uses butter mallets to hammer the keys with the force she insists is necessary. Also, being an impatient little whirlwind, she gives the laptop an instruction and, if it hasn't responded in 2.4 picoseconds, then gives it another, and another, and another, and another, hitting the keys ever harder each time, until the computer is so confused and overloaded it gives in, melts down and screams for a break. "It's broken again! Stupid thing. It's hopeless," she wails. The laptop was only coaxed back into life when STB EW eventually gave up, it was left to lick its cyber wounds and I spoke to it gently and soothingly an hour later, promising never to let the nasty lady near it again.
Next on the hitlist was the telly. Having abandoned the laptop she decided to take a break and channel surf a little. The trouble is, there are remote controls for the TV, the surround-sound, the video and broadband. If pressing ANY button on ANY one of them doesn't produce the desired result, Mrs P-For-Not-Much-Longer always then insists on pressing ALL the buttons on ALL of the remotes. The result is the telly ends up teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, just like the computer, and so shuts down to avoid further harm. It took a good hour to work out what she had done, unscramble all the instructions fed in and get the system back up and running again.
Time for a break at lunch. She dragged her knuckles into the kitchen and put the oven on to do a jacket potato or something. She was in there approximately 15 minutes while I was upstairs working when I heard that familiar refrain again. "It's broken! Stupid thing. It's hopeless." I have no idea what she had done but, as she said, the cooker was broken, and still is. No heat, no lights, nothing. That's now got to be repaired.
Into the afternoon and I figured she still had about five hours of breakage time left so I started to shadow her, holding onto vases and porcelain as she passed, throwing myself across electrical fittings to shield them from her internal forcefield and herding the dogs out of her way to prevent them going down with mange. All went well until about 4pm when I let my guard down. STB EW gave me the slip while I was making a cup of tea and let the dogs out into the back garden. Nothing wrong with that, you might think? No, not at all, until it came time to let them back in again. "Where are the dogs?" I asked. "I let them out. I'll go and let them back in," she said. Seconds later she piped up: "Oh flip! It's broken! Stupid thing. It's hopeless." My blood drained. What now? Had the legs fallen off the dogs? Had the back garden disappeared down a giant, disused mineshaft? No, what had happened was she had locked the back door when she let the dogs out (God alone knows why) and bent the key in the lock so that the door would no longer open! We managed to get the dogs back in through the patio windows but the back door is still bust and has joined the list of necessary repairs.

There are times when my STB EW doesn't break things - it's when she's asleep, although lord knows what damage she causes in her dreams. You never quite get your head above water, repairwise, round here at The Towers. No sooner have you put the roof back on than one of the walls "accidentally fell over when I touched it".
Ho hum. I would not wish the destructive power of my otherwise lovely STB EW on the people of Grantham but all other accident prone people can go.