They Should Have Asked My Husband

You know, this world is complicated and imperfect and oppressed
And it’s not hard to feel timid, apprehensive and depressed.
It seems that all around us tides of questions ebb and flow
And people want solutions but they don’t know where to go.

Opinions abound but who is wrong and who is right?
People need a prophet, a diffuser of the light,
Someone they can turn to as the crises rage and swirl,
Someone with the remedy, the wisdom, the pearl…

Well, they should have asked my husband, he’d have really gone to town.
With his thoughts on immigration, teenage mothers, Gordon Brown,
The future of the monarchy, house prices in the South,
The wait for hip replacements, BSE and foot-and-mouth.

Oh, they should have asked my husband, he can sort out any mess,
He can rejuvenate the railways, he can cure the NHS
So any little niggle, anything you want to know
Just run it past my husband, wind him up and let him go.

Congestion on the motorways, free holidays for thugs,
The damage to the ozone layer, refugees, drugs,
These may defeat the brain of any politician bloke,
But present it to my husband: he will solve it at a stroke.

He’ll clarify the situation, he will make it crystal clear,
You’ll feel the glazing of your eyeballs and the bending of your ear.
Corruption at the top, he’s an authority on that,
And the Mafia, Gaddafia and Yasser Arafat.

Upon these areas he brings his intellect to shine
In a great compelling voice that’s twice as loud as yours or mine,
I often wonder what it must be like to be so strong,
Infallible, articulate, self-confident and wrong.

When it comes to tolerance he hasn’t got a lot,
Joy-riders should be guillotined and muggers should be shot,
The sound of his own voice becomes like music to his ears,
And he hasn’t got an inkling that he’s boring us to tears.

My friends don’t call so often, they have busy lives I know,
But it’s not every day you want to hear a windbag suck and blow.
Encyclopaedias! On them we never have to call,
Why clutter up the bookshelf when my husband… knows it all.

'They Should Have Asked My Husband' read by the author from Pam Ayres The Broken Woman (Hodder Audiobooks, 2008), original text copyright Pam Ayres 2006, from Surgically Enhanced (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006), used by permission of the author

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