Mr Wrong: The One Item Even Argos Won’t Take Back
LONDON — Britain is a nation that has made a national religion of taking things back. We’ve got the Consumer Rights Act, a fourteen-day cooling-off period, and the inalienable right to march into John Lewis with a kettle and a story. If a toaster isn’t fit for purpose, you get your money back and a small apology from a teenager called Liam. If a man isn’t fit for purpose, you get eighteen years, a shared surname on the school WhatsApp, and a standing arrangement at Christmas. There is an MOT for a fourteen-year-old Vauxhall. There is, as yet, no MOT for a fella.
Due Diligence, and the Contract Nobody Read
We are a meticulous people. We’ll read forty reviews before buying a £19 air fryer, scrolling past the five stars to find the one furious bloke in Stoke who says the basket warped. We compare. We cross-reference. We check the returns policy before we’ve even taken the thing out of the box. And then that very same careful shopper will go and have a baby with a man she met outside a Wetherspoons on a Tuesday, on the strength of his confidence and a van that, on closer inspection, belonged to his cousin Dave and was only available at weekends.
No reviews. No star rating. No verified-purchase badge. Just a feeling, a few pints of Carling, and then a small person who has your eyes and his complete inability to indicate at a roundabout. The trouble with the wrong man is that he doesn’t show himself on day one. He arrives slowly, like a private parking charge that lands three weeks after you parked, when you’ve already spent the money and there’s no appealing it.
“He’ll Change,” and Other Famous Last Words
There is no phrase in the English language more expensive than “he’ll change.” It costs more than the wedding, more than the deposit on the flat, more than the second wedding to a far better man you should’ve waited for. Jack Dee could deliver the whole tragedy in one weary sentence and a look that says he’s seen this exact bloke nursing a warm lager in a Harvester. Jo Brand has spent decades on the gap between what men promise and what men deliver, and the wrong man is simply that gap given a name and a season ticket. Sarah Millican knows the bit too, the woman cheerfully hanging her partner’s red flags up like bunting at a village fête, telling her mates she finds him “a bit of a character.”
The flags were never bunting. The flags were the disclosure statement, and she signed without reading, the way we all click “I agree” to the terms and conditions. And here’s the part that never makes it onto a Clinton Cards birthday verse. You don’t merely date the wrong man. You enlist him into the gene pool, permanently. His chin is now structural. His refusal to reverse-park is now hereditary, idling in a car seat, waiting its turn to ruin a christening in 2051.
Co-Parenting: The Group Project With No End Date
Anyone who endured a school group project understands the arithmetic. Four names on the cover, one person doing the work, and a lad called Gary taking the credit at assembly. Co-parenting with the wrong man is that project exactly, except it’s never marked, it never finishes, and Gary still wants a mention in the graduation speech. He’ll RSVP to your entire life. The birthdays, the nativity play, the wedding, the funeral. He’s a plus-one to everything that ever mattered to you, he’ll be late, and he’ll bring a girlfriend named Chelsea who is somehow twenty-four in perpetuity.
The state, bless it, would like to assist. The state’s idea of assisting is the Child Maintenance Service, which is a department, a portal, a reference number, and a hold queue long enough to potty-train the child yourself while listening to a panpipe arrangement of a song you used to like. Frankie Boyle could do ten unprintable minutes on the CMS alone, an organisation that pursues an absent father with all the ferocity of a librarian asking you to keep it down. It is the closest thing this country offers to a refund on a man, and it functions roughly as well as you’d expect a government refund to function, which is to say it sends you a letter in eleven weeks asking you to confirm details it already had.
The Last Market Nobody Regulates
And here’s the truth under the laughing. Choosing who fathers your children is the last genuinely unregulated transaction left in British life. Ofsted doesn’t inspect him. Trading Standards won’t take the case. There’s no quango, no consultation, no taxpayer-funded review panel, and certainly no bailout when the whole venture goes under. The one regulator who warned you, your mum, was overruled at the dispatch box and told she didn’t understand him. There are now 3.2 million lone-parent families in the UK, most of them headed by mothers, and a great many of those women are running a household on one income because a man made promises with the structural integrity of a wet Greggs bag. That isn’t a tragedy that fell from the sky. It’s a contract, signed in good faith, that nobody read aloud first.
So vet him like you’d vet a used Mondeo, because the Mondeo is cheaper, easier to insure, and you can flog it on Facebook Marketplace when it stops working. The right man is worth the wait and the wait is worth the right man. The wrong one ought to come with a warning label, which is the single thing he will never, ever come with.
Our American cousins are working the same beat from across the pond over at Bohiney, where the wrong man drives a bigger truck and the child support office is somehow even worse.
This is British satire, brewed strong and served without milk. The London Prat runs on an unlikely London partnership between the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy graduate who packed in the seminar room to milk cows, and between the lecture and the livestock they worked out one law of British life: the powerful and the pompous flinch hardest when you laugh at them on purpose. None of this is a press release. Read it, have a chuckle, then go and vet somebody properly. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
