Sipping cognac after a light evening repast of smoked quail egg duck terrine and lamb chops, grilled redder than m’lady’s love for me, we’re watching some very loud television program featuring scantily clad young women and bushy-bearded men. I’ve never really understood the concept, the concept of television, frankly. Who needs pictures when there’s a perfectly good wireless contraption about? Leave a little bit to the powers of imagination, what? If I wanted pictures, well, that’s what the moving pictures are for. It’s right there in the name. Such damnéd hybridization will be the death of us all!

Try as I might to be subtle about it, to keep such things to myself as any gentleman should, I am forced during a particularly jejeune and abrasive commercial break to de-wind a bout of internal turmoil, as it were. Pass some gas. Bottom burp, as dear mama would say. Cut the cheese according to my much less refined boyhood cook, Monsieur Potato Gratin which wasn’t his real name. Just a playful moniker I dubbed him with, as I so did love the dish. Potato Gratin.

Now, one might assume, being the ardent sophisticate that she is, m’lady would not tolerate such public expulsions of borborygmus. Indeed, that is usually the case. She once overturned a Ruff and Honours table claiming an opponent created a distraction by letting loose with some foul odors of the intestinal sort despite his great protestations to the contrary, himself blaming the disagreeable aroma on the frightful Époisses that had achieved room temperature during the course of our game. Truthfully, I believe it was all a shrewd act on my good wife’s part upon the realization that she was hopelessly behind on points and would never successfully dig herself out of such a deep hole. Of her many good traits, poor losing is among them. One never achieves the giddy heights in life by honourably accepting defeat. Even in parlour games.

However, she stoically indulges my occasional gaseous outburst as she has come to realize that mine is caused not by dynamical inner fractiousness but by external forces pressing down upon me. The outside world, and how it sometimes can be, has been known to wreak havoc upon my constitution, normally made of sterner stuff as exhibited by an uncanny ability to go weeks, fortnights, months even, forgoing the detestable food group known as ruffage. I sort my own digestion by regularly incorporating gravel into my diet, downed with a punchy cordial. Much like our forebears did.

But there are simply times that can be too much, to onerous to bear.

“What,” m’lady turns to me and asks, after gesturing to Gerhardt, our evening man, to mute the sound blaring from the television, “seems to be the problem tonight, Admiral?”

I smile meekly, uncomfortably even, as a genuine sign of contrition for the rude interruption, though I know it isn’t necessary since she referred to me as the ‘Admiral’, a playful nickname she uses for me as I’m convinced in a past life I had been a seafaring adventurist and strict on-board disciplinarian, feared for my excessive use of keelhauling. It soothes me to hear her say it, to call me by that name. In fact, it wasn’t unknown in the past that I might don a Nelsonian bicorn while going pantless in the boudoir.

“Well, I don’t know, my dearest,” I began, adjusting myself in the chair, attempting to quiet my still spirited bowels. “Doesn’t it seem to you that we may be living through similar days to those of August 1914, just before the lamps went out all over Europe as Churchill said?”

M’lady sighs, not at all sympathetically if I’m getting the tone correct, with an accompanying eye-roll that if you listen closely enough makes the sound of glass being ground to make spectacles. Never a good sign. I fight desperately not to make more audible wind at this moment.

“Churchill did not say those words, m’dear,” she informs me as if she’s about to fit me with a dunce cap and sit me in a corner. “That was Edward Grey.”

I don’t think so, I think but don’t say, because right then my flatulence gets the better of me.

“My sincerest apologies,” I say, head bowed. My good wife’s indulgence is beneficent but tends to be short-lived.

She brushes my lack of gastro-fortitude aside, and continues to delve into the reasons for it.

“How is our current situation similar to August 1914?” she asks.

“Well, it seems to me as if we are caught up in some unruly, tumultuous wave of history with no one proper at the helm to calm the waters, to keep us afloat and from going under, engulfed in the tides of time and turmoil, no better, no more in control of our lives than the basest of sentient beings, at the mercy of nameless, faceless forces that we cannot even hope to comprehend nevermind control!”

Oops. Again. A rolling squibbler of an emanation, like a weak-willed roll of a timpani drum.

“PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER, MAN!” m’lady screams, leading to another earthy release from down under and behind. A full-bodied one, it feels like. Hardy. Stout. Like a final note, if I’m not mistaken.

If there’s one thing my wife detests even more than lengthy bouts of doubt and despair manifest as foul pockets of air, it’s the giving into the fatalism of historical materialism. She won’t have it. Can’t abide it. Calls it an explicatory crutch for weak thinkers. An intellectual cushion in which to lay their empty heads.

“History isn’t a thing,” she lectures in her inimitable reprimanding tone of voice. “It’s a construct, erected by Great Men and Bold Women out of the amorphous passing of time. History is nothing without us, without us giving meaning and shape to it. History cannot hurt us because without us history doesn’t exist. It’s just one day after another, minute to minute, hour by hour, one season becoming the next. What kind of whimpering man allows such fashionable nonsense like ‘history’ to loosen his bowels as if he were some swaddled infant?”

Naturally, I respond with more passing of wind, the last of it, it feels like, as a certain calmness quells my upset gut.

This is not the first time we’ve had a heated philosophical discussion over the matter. Despite her always forceful presentation, as it were, I cannot embrace such hippity-dippity notions of absolute free will and self-determination. That’s a recipe for anarchy. Every man for himself! If it feels good, do it!

There is such a thing as fortune, Fortune with a capital F. Made manifest by the actions of Man, yet not created by Man. Kant gave a name to such phenomenon, but my German fails me at the moment. Descartes too, I believe it was, conjectured that our minds were separate from the stuff and matter of the world swirling all around us, beyond our powers of reason.

“Even if you were correct,” m’lady continues, adopting a more temperate tone that aligns with the quieting of my intestinal workings, “and the lamps were going out all over Europe and elsewhere, what of it? Don’t you think it’s about time?”

“About time?” I inquire. “For what?”

“For a great conflagration!” she proclaims. “It’s been a while, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Forgotten?! I lived it! I was there! In spirit if not body. My family owes a good part of its good fortune—there’s that word again!—to supplying the needs for that war. How could I have forgotten such a thing?

“Maybe we’ve been passively sitting back for too long, simply allowing ‘history’ to go about its business,” she continues. “Maybe that’s the problem vexing you, my darling. Maybe it’s time we reassert ourselves, reassert our domination of ‘history’, rein it back in under our control, hmmm? Another mighty martial set-to, hmm? Sort the wheat from the chaff, shall we? Establish the boundaries again between the strong and the weak. The majors and the minors. What do you say? There were some, people, countries, true warriors, that arose from the Great One, invigorated and stronger than before.”

There are times, and this is most definitely one of them, when I realize that m’lady exhibits downright Pattonesque qualities. A fearsome leader of men who, if I am frank and honest with myself, would slit my throat in my sleep if circumstances so dictated without losing so much as a wink of shuteye. Just lie there beside me as I bled out, dreaming of cratered battlefields. It gives me butterflies, a pleasantly tingling sensation throughout my lower extremities. Preferable, most assuredly, to the grinding and a loquacious murmurations I had just experienced.

“Well, m’lady,” I coo as a sign of surrender to her strength, “history be damned. If it’s a great conflagration you want, I’m certain it’ll be a great conflagration you’ll have.”

She smiles a slight smile, wrinkles her nose at me and signals to Gerhardt for a resumption of sound from the television set. I sit back in my wingback, my constitution restored to a tranquil stillness and take a sip of cognac, scantily clad women and busy-bearded me cavorting and conniving on the screen front before us.