who is ‘mavis’?

people always ask me, “why does your husband call you ‘mavis’?” i try to explain to them that it is a take on an old bbc character, ‘hyacinth’ from “keeping up appearances”. but apparently i’m the only one who watches saturday night brit coms.

when my husband first saw hyacinth, he immediately began to draw parallels between her and his own lovely wife. i did not find it flattering. she is a rather awful woman. loud, tactless, excessive, bossy, domineering, a hovering neat-freak (“mind the wallpaper!”), obsessed with appearances and gleefully ignorant of people around her. so i was ‘beatrice’ when i spent money on something i couldn’t afford or tried to pick the paint colors for someone else’s house. somehow it evolved into ‘mavis’ and so it remains. i am mavis when i windex the shower curtain rod because people are coming over or harass my husband to level the birdbath and the refrigerator because it drives me crazy. but i’m afraid he’s not richard (submissive and longsuffering), so you don’t have to feel sorry for him. ‘richard’ wouldn’t go around tipping all the picture frames an imperceptible eighth of an inch to push me over the edge. hubby is much more akin to onslow.