Pillow talk: Secret drawers

Another bedtime conversation with the 'Mistress of the house', and another worrying trip into some of the less stable recesses of her imagination.
Recently, she heard some news about a married couple she once knew but whose marriage had since broken up - all the gory details of their separation were now beginning to trickle out into the public domain. Now, my wife is as interested in salacious gossip as the next fishwife, and lapped all this information up eagerly, but one little snippet caught her imagination more than anything else - apparently, when the house was being sorted out 'post breakup' it was discovered that the male party involved (who, as was very apparent in my wife's retelling, she deemed the villain of the piece) had a number of hiding places around the house where he had been concealing expensive consumer electronic goods from his wife. This was so that she could neither make use of them herself, or ever know how much they had cost: he had just bought them and squirreled them away for his own private use.
"Isn't that awful?" asks my wife, as soon as she finishes telling me.
"Mm-hmmm..." I say, feeling that I should at least indicate halfhearted agreement, because it's clear that even token dissent on my part would automatically mean I was siding with the enemy. In fact, what I am really thinking is that it seems pretty pathetic. In the scheme of things, when considering the whole great pantheon of marital felonies that a man can commit, 'hiding some stuff in a drawer' seems pretty lame. I am not familiar with the unhappy couple in question at all, and I have no idea if there were a number of other offences to consider, but still: this does seem like the marital equivalent of bringing down Al Capone on charges of tax evasion. I want to make it very clear at this point to the audience in general (and to one reader in particular) that I am not advocating shoddy behaviour in any way - but if my marriage lay in tatters all around me, I think I'd rather be described as "the bastard who ran off with a Latvian pole-dancer half his age" than as "the sad little man who hid an I-Pod Touch from his wife in the back of the wardrobe".

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Tablets, smut, molluscs and moles.

It's been a while. I need to vent some spleen.
It's not the big things that will do for me - I've coped quite well with all the usual crises that we are told are dangerous for your stress levels: births, deaths, house moves, job changes, relationship breakups, car crashes, redundancy and the like - but the little things, the low-level daily unpleasantness and irritations, they are the events that are going to tip me over the edge. Instead of dealing with them calmly and rationally, I do nothing, and allow a corrosive bitterness to well up inside me, that finally vents in a moment of pure, blind rage over something innocuous. Be warned.
Recently, events that have contributed to my inner well of bile are:

The incorrect selling of hayfever tablets: In the UK, there is a limit on the amount of medicine you can buy at once, in an attempt to prevent people from killing themselves with fistfuls of pills. This is one of those well-meaning laws that are steeped in good intentions but in fact just cause irritation - as the legal limit only applies on a 'per transaction' basis, it essentially serves no practical purpose: would-be suicides can easily get all the paracetamol they need by simply queueing up again (which is a depressing enough process to have to do once, so I can't imagine that being forced to do it multiple times does anything other than underline their decision).
However, rules are rules, and I understand that. I also understand that, should I inadvertently have more then the legal limit of hayfever tablets in my shopping basket (let's say, ooh, three packets, instead of two) then the store is quite right to remind me of the law in this matter and refuse to sell me the extra packet. Perfectly reasonable. I can perhaps do without the patronising little lecture at the checkout, but OK.
However, if that same store is actually deliberately selling hayfever tablets on a 'three for the price of two' deal , thus encouraging members of the public to put three packets of tablets in their basket in the first place, that is not reasonable. That is both stupid and annoying, as I explained at some volume at the time. I am not suicidal, I am thrifty - and it's not my mental faculties you should be worrying about, you shambling pack of halfwits.
What annoys me most is the fact that I clearly let myself down a bit in the end. If I am honest, telling some poor misbegotten checkout girl on minimum wage that she should "fire your entire marketing department" is highly unlikely to affect any kind of change, and just makes me look like a pillock.

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