When Denzel met Lara

As we all know women are incredibly beautiful creatures however they are also incredibly diverse, challenging and complex individuals. Much like a hedge maze, just when you think you are getting somewhere and starting to understand them you realise you are back at the beginning and need to start all over again.

The other day I spent the day with a bit of an enigma. I thought I understood women and their outlook on shopping, but then along came Lara to throw a spanner in the works and mislead me back to the beginning of the maze. Lara as you may already know is my very good friend Denzels’ wife. I have known her for as long as I have Denzel and consider her one of my closest, dearest friends. She has always been a bit of an oddity, but in a charming way and no more so than most women. Should you ever meet her, no matter on the time of year you will undoubtedly find her wrapped in a blanket. This is a woman that would get cold in the tropics; I have never known anything quite like it. Should she venture into the great outdoors she will adorn more layers than an Eskimo and make it the very briefest of journeys. When she isn’t wrapped head to toe in blankets, fleece and perched on a radiator you will find her meticulously cleaning her house, which with Denzel and the two most beautiful, albeit untidy girls is a never ending job. The day I spent with her in question today was our fake Christmas day and the look on her face as her prided carpet began to vanish under reams of wrapping paper was a picture, but that’s another story for another time.


Lara brings new meanings to the word fussy, (quite how she ended up with Denzel I’ll never know but that is the mystery of love) if you were to cross Monica from the American situation comedy “Friends” and Sally from the film “When Harry met Sally” you may just start to get close to Lara. There is not enough room on the internet to go into her peculiarities when it comes to food let alone everything else but to give you an example should a chicken ever be purchased for consumption in the Denzel, Lara household the kitchen will have been scrubbed from top to bottom and resemble something from a hospital theatre, I always know when we are having chicken for dinner when I go round there because before entering the house you will find one of those red hand washing dispensers found in hospitals by the front door with a big sign saying “Please scrub your hands”, gloves will be adorned and worn at all times whilst said chicken is in the house, even if you are not handling the chicken, children will be bathed in iodine and kept in a different county until the chicken has been cooked and should you happen to walk past the chicken in its raw state Lara will immediately grab you and throw you into a sheep dip. Once the chicken has finally been cooked, (not by her I might add, she still doesn’t know where her oven is) it will be dissected like something out of a high school science class and anything that doesn’t look quite right will be incinerated, (much like the rest of the chicken).

But, like I said at the beginning women are diverse and complex so none of this really contributes to her enigma status adorned earlier. What threw me today and led me back to the beginning of the maze was this. As we all know there isn’t much, with the exception of chocolate that makes a woman happier than when she is shopping, this is exaggerated further more when she is shopping for shoes. Now from what I can understand Lara had purchased a pair of shoes which had since split on her and she was now looking for a replacement on the internet. But rather than bring joy and happiness this only troubled and frustrated her, maybe it was because it was the internet and not actually walking the streets going into shops that didn’t marry well, but this being Lara I assumed the idea of shopping from within the comfort of her own home whilst being wrapped in an extra thick blanket would be the best of both worlds. Instead we were treated to a rather perturbed Lara who constantly flicked from one internet page to another in search of the illusive “just right” pair of boots. The lap top was at one point nearly launched across the room and imbedded in the Christmas pudding when she accidently clicked on the wrong button and lost one of the aforementioned pages. She finally managed to whittle it down to two or three pairs of shoes and was now trying to decide on which would be better suited and at what cost. Now from previous experience women seem to go price blind when it comes to shopping for shoes and can end up paying hundreds of pounds for a couple of straps and a tiny buckle but the price seems to have been what troubled Lara most, that and how she would inevitably return them which seems to be a prerequisite when women buy anything. Men don’t return stuff, it just sits in the bottom of the wardrobe, women on the other hand are masters at returning items they don’t want, or heaven forbid have worn for the single occasion they brought it for and then returned it for “not being quite what they wanted”. Lara actually sat down and read the terms of agreement and contract to the pair of shoes she had finally decided upon just so she could be certain that she would be able to return them.

Maybe this was all a charade put on for Denzels benefit, maybe had we not been there shoes would have been brought in there hundreds with no regard to price and suitability. But for now Lara will remain a mystery as I think all women are. Something man is never meant to understand fully but should enjoy trying to solve.


Never take a woman for granted, they will surprise and intrigue you more and more every day. Just when you think there is nothing left to learn you will find yourself back at the entrance to the maze, which is why we love them so.