It is hard to know what to say when your best friend tells you that he’s going to ask his girlfriend to marry him. Firstly, Ronald’s only twenty-six which highlights just how ill-equipped he is to make this decision. Secondly, she’s a bit of a pain in the arse, which is an obvious problem for all involved.

 

Let’s address the qualities of his potential wife, which, none of us have been honest enough to tell him is a pain in the hole. Since meeting her he has totally changed! He used to be one of the lads, but now we never see him. I thought we were best friends but I never see him anymore and there is a suggestion that he won’t make my birthday festivities this year. He doesn’t even have an excuse and don’t get me started on all this feminist bullshit he keeps trotting out. He wasn’t talking about gender quotas and pay gaps before she came along, even if these issues are of significance for us all. It’s that he’s changed and even though she is great, she is the one that changed him.

 

I don’t think at twenty-six he has the mental faculties to make a decision of this magnitude. I mean, he can hardly manage to pass his annual sim check to renew his license, never mind organising and partaking in a wedding that I guarantee is going to get out of hand faster than a fight outside a Dublin chip-shop at 3 in the morning.

 

I’ve decided that it’s not going to work just telling him she’s changed him and made him soft, instead I am going with a more subtle approach.

 

My sister is in town for the weekend and I’ve offered to take her son Luke for the evening so she can go to dinner with her muppet of a husband. With this in mind I’ve got double mayhem planned as I advised Jane and John to go to a restaurant that I know is way out of their budget and I invited Ronald over to help me babysit.

 

Ronald has not spent much time around children so as soon as I smell the first dirty nappy I crank up the pressure. “You wanna check that nappy? It smells like he might have dropped a bomb in there!” Ronald seems confused, “Excuse me?” I raise an eyebrow and tell him “just stick your hand in there and see if there’s brown in town.” While firing his hand into the nappy he simultaneously asks, “Are you sure?” His expression answers that question for everyone as he withdraws his shit covered fingertips from Luke’s nappy. I don’t move a muscle and just shrug my shoulders, “Win some, lose some.”

 

Being the sound fella I am I offer to change the nappy, but I make sure he gets to put the filthy nappy in the bin after having spent 5 minutes digging baby chocolate from under his finger nails.

 

With me making no effort to put Luke to sleep, I’ve got him sitting on my knee watching Frozen on my iPhone, he is starting to get cranky. It’s perfect because my sister walks in with a face on her like Ronda Rousey after getting head kicked into oblivion and just starts barking asking, “Why the fuck is Luke still awake?” I just shrug my shoulders and ask her, “What’s up?”

 

In walks John with his tail between his legs and she shoots him a look that would make Trump blush. “This tight fucker, here, felt that we couldn’t have starters for dinner because they were too expensive”, she just glares at him. He says nothing, because he knows better. On the other hand it was I who started this and I intended to finish it; turning to Luke I nod and ask, “You want to go out for a few drinks or are you saving for wedding shite?”

 

He says nothing, because he’s just like John now – a man without a voice in a sea full of nappies and cheap dinners.

 

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