The homicide will be premeditated but justified. That much is clear. Just whom I will be constrained to slaughter, and how many, will become clear in time.

These thoughts surfaced as I lay in bed with my wife on the morning of December 3 this year. We married on that date in 1969, an overcast day with threat of rain. It was a good day and many good days have followed. We lay together and did what we often do: I slandered our children and their mother defended them. Together we reviewed our forty seven years: accrued are three children and seven* grandchildren; lost are three parents and one sibling. Time’s balance sheet. 

The three children are of good character but, as even their mother is forced to admit, of infirm mind. Two of the three watch ‘Survivor’ and ‘Australian Survivor’, while a third watches ‘Bachelor’ and ‘Bachelorette’. Compounding this, the last-mentioned watches those programs in company with his underage children.

We shook our heads. We shook our jowls. Where did we go wrong?

But wherefore homicide? This day, this turning of our year, is called an anniversary. It is our forty-seventh.

Listening to the National Broadcaster nowadays we hear such fatuities as ‘On the six-month anniversary of such and such…’ The same offense against grammar and logic is perpetrated in my narrowsheet (formerly broadsheet) newspaper. I grind my gums and froth and writhe.

And here, in whispering small font, I confess to shameful acts carried out by our own posterity: our children speak of their parents’ forty-seven year anniversary.

So, homicide of course. Naturally. How will I do it? Strangulation, I suppose. While I plot it in cool blood, I know it will be in white heat that I silence those tautologising throats. In the face of such provocation no jury could possibly convict.
*Watch this space, as the uterus said to the ovary.