Breaking Chairs

Someone left a comment here yesterday suggesting that I review the new installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Personally, I think it looks great - and I love that Carsten Holler has the balls to argue that 'scientists' have proved that sliding is good for you. However, I won't actually be going on the slides myself because I am scared that I would get stuck in them and have to be cut out by amused firemen.

The thing is that I am big, too big for most normal things. I'm not like a freak or anything (Well I don't think I am. I've never been asked to join a circus or anything.) I'm just tall and also fat. The kind of guy that small tossers in pubs feel they can say "You okay there big man" to. The sort of person who you might want on your rugby team, but not sitting next to you on the plane. The sort of person you'd ask to help to move a fridge rather than test out a new deck chair. Sometimes when I look at photos of mrs househusbandnot and I, I think I am a different species: like a polar bear standing next to normal bear, or that massive frog that David Attenborough was holding in the rain forest compared to a frog you'd see in a garden pond.

This isn't dismorphia. I have broken chairs, and leaned against tables that have creaked ominously, and been stared at by everyone else in the crowded lift when it won't work. (There is a story about me being asked to leave a children's party when I was five because I had knocked a wall over, but I think - and hope - this is just a myth perpetuated by my sisters.) Take that simulated freefalling I told you about in the summer. I knew that I was going to be too big to do it, and I knew it was going to be humiliating having this proved in front of mrs househusbandnot and the other people doing the simulation that day.

Size does have its advantages. You get served in pubs quicker, and can see at gigs, and you can reach stuff on shelves. But it is also a real chore, having to check to see if chairs will break under you, gingerly parking your arse on a garden seat designed to hold a child or a gnome, pretending that you would rather stand than sit on some antique chair that was designed to hold dainty ladies in waiting. I've been checking out chairs just about all my life. And I've never been able to do stuff like perch on the arms of sofas or armchairs, or nip lightly onto very small boats, or go up ladders without worrying that they might break or buckle under my weight. (Well I have done all these things, and usually with disastrous consequences.) Garden furniture is the worst. It is all made for thin midgets.

Like most big people - and I'm sorry here if the few of you who don't know me are still getting over the fact that househusbandnot isn't some willowy wispy person - I spend half my time worrying about it, about 30% thinking I should do something about it (although even when I was younger and lighter I was still too big) and the other 20% staring at people in the street trying to work out if any of them are my size. (mrs househusbandnot can be seen regularly dragging me away from ogling large men in public. Actually, I have to tell you this: On my second date with mrs househusbandnot, it was all going well, and I hadn't broken any chairs at the restaurant we'd been to, and she seemed to be falling for the he is actually quite normal stuff. And we were walking back to her place when two really drunk Australians stopped dead in front of us. I thought for a second they were going to try and pick a fight, but they just stared at me some more and one said to the other: "Geeze man. Check him out. He's maaaaassive. He's got to be some sort of Russian or something". It was like being in a zoo. It is to mrs househusbandnot's credit that she didn't run for the hills there and then. [Actually, I think she needed a fridge moving that evening.])

So, no slide rides at Tate Modern for me I'm afraid. But keep the suggestions coming, as long as they don't involve walking on ice or sitting on stools. Right, I'm off for a swim...