I’m delighted to be joined… at least, I think I’m delighted to be joined today by Marie St Clair, who comes straight from the pages of… well, I’ll let her tell you that herself.
Over to you, Marie.
My name is Marie St Clair. I’m a psychiatrist at a prominent British hospital. I have received many professional honours, as well as an O.B.E. from the Queen. My ascent to the heights of my profession was not made easier because I’m a woman. Men, even in this day and age, even in the medical profession, don’t take kindly to the intrusion of the ‘weaker sex’ into their domain. One would think doctors, especially psychiatrists, who are intelligent, educated and supposedly secure in their masculinity, would not fear a woman. But men were and still are intimidated by my beauty. I was strikingly beautiful when a young woman and even now that I’ve reached a certain age, men, even those considerably younger than myself, still find me very attractive.
But recently my husband of twenty-five years, the only man I have ever loved, told me I was a harridan and ran off with a woman two or three years older than myself – which came as a great shock and even led to some lapses in my professional judgement. I never thought it possible that my husband, whom I loved and cared for all these years, would walk out on me. If she had been young and pretty I’d have forgiven him, allowing for his hormones and a mid-life crisis – letting his testosterone make his life-changing decisions.
Although my practice was varied and I have helped many people with many different types of problems, from early in my professional life, marriage and the intricacies of the relationship between a woman and a man never ceased to intrigue. Now I knew what kept me faithful to my husband. I loved him, he loved me. We were intellectually compatible, having the same cultural background – the perfect couple. In addition to this the sex was always incredible – our mutual touching sparked an unbelievable passion. I will not divulge details but our love-making could have been the inspiration for many an erotic film – we did not know or care for inhibition, while every act was by mutual consent – we would not have had it any other way.
But so many of my patients were mismatched! How they ever decided that they were compatible and destined to live together ‘until death us do part’ was a mystery. I observed that when the wife, for I only dealt with married heterosexual couples, was dominant, the marriage was more easily repaired. Divorce inevitably resulted when the husband, to coin a phrase, ‘had a mind of his own’.
So after years of research, empirical but nevertheless well-founded, I developed this theory. It is not necessary to be right to be happy. Happiness will result from allowing your mate to be happy, even if submitting to her every whim is required. Why do I say her? Because marriages where the wife was the dominatrix, seemed to be more blissful. I did not have the statistics to prove this theory – as I said my observations were empirical – so I needed proof.
I looked around for the perfect couple to do a pilot study, which, or so I thought, I’d found in Patricia and Rodney Hart. The results of this study are to be found in Just for Fun an eclectic anthology of short stories and essays written by Henry Tobias, available as an e-book from your favourite e-book retailer and in print from CreateSpace. The title Just for Fun is an appropriate one because I thought my experiment would provide fun, joy and eternal bliss to all marriages.
Just for Fun is an eclectic anthology of short stories and essays written over a period of several years by Henry Tobias for his writing group. It was never his intention to publish, but as his stories were well received and with self-publishing, thanks to modern technology, being as stress free as it is today, he decided that the relative small outlay was worthwhile. This outlay came from securing rights for some of the pictures used to illustrate his stories like, the Andy Capp cartoon, and the reproductions of the painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt van Rijn. Once the e-book had been published and distributed on Smashwords, the next obvious step was print. There are many small publishers who are willing to publish print-on-demand books today, but Henry chose the do-it-yourself route offered by Amazon’s CreateSpace, for two reasons. The first was the challenge of getting to grips with the technology, not easy for a baby-boomer. The second reason was being able to say ‘I did it myself’. Furthermore, I had been told about D-I-Y websites for cover design of e-books. I discovered Canva, a company apparently located in Australia. I find the site easy and fun to use and when I do have problems I get a prompt reply. I don’t get any financial benefit for mentioning Smashwords, Amazon’s CreateSpace or Canva.
Henry Tobias was born in London, England and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he trained as a pharmacist. As a young boy he was a member of Zionist Youth Movements – one of the factors which influenced his decision to live in Israel. The other influence was The Holocaust – the murder of some SIX MILLION Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices, which included citizens of many of the nations across Europe. He has a deep love of reading, especially history, particularly of World War II, The Holocaust including The Kindertransport and Jewish history throughout the ages. Some of his favourite authors are Richard Overy, Bernard Lewis and John Toland. Now retired, he writes and edits. He lives near Jerusalem with Jill, his wife of 44 years. He has three adult children and so far one beautiful granddaughter. He has published one anthology of eclectic short stories and essays, Just for Fun, and is currently working on his second book, an historical novel of World War II, provisionally titled Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother, which he hopes to publish before the end of 2016.
Links
Just for Fun can be found on Smashwords, Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Oyster and Flipkart.
Henry Tobias can be found on his blog.
Miriam Drori, Author 