with Jill Campbell Mackay
Toilet training and toenails
WHEN IT comes to being a woman some universal truths have been in operation for eons.
For example, no matter which generation you are born in, shoes — lots of them — are utterly essential. Shopping has the status of an essential art form, with a ‘Sale’ sign in a window giving us almost the same frisson of excitement and anticipation as going on a first date.
We are also credited with being capable of switching conversation topics to at least five different subjects in six minutes (on average). Multiple tasks are no problem: I can, for example, stir a pot of chili, lay the table, uncork a bottle of wine, talk on the phone, stroke the cat, and drink a gin and tonic simultaneously.
Male universal truths include the ability in most to understand the composition of an engine, the offside rule, and mains wiring — yet they will find themselves cerebrally stretched to work an iron, washing machine, oven, or even a simple pedal bin. Men are to house-work what Damien was to evangelical Christianity.
True, we have been able to train a chimpanzee to drink from a cup and make a dog sit up and beg, but try to train a man to leave the toilet seat down, deposit his dirty clothes in the laundry basket, or hang the sodden bath towel on the rail rather than on the set of invisible floor hooks in the bathroom and you are on to a classic one hundred per cent no-hoper. You’d be better off using this energy trying to teach the cat to lower a yoyo into a thermos flask.
Now an intelligent person might consider this attitude to be really strange when you think that men usually like to please women; alas, the truth is that pleasing a woman has got to be only on their terms. And here we encounter one of life’s truisms – men will do anything for sex. So this gives us women a certain amount of leverage, as in “mow the lawn or no rumpy pumpy tonight, matey”.
Now this could be construed to be a tad manipulative, but men are to almost all intents and purposes four-year-olds in that they hardly respond to reasoning or straightforward type argument — all they really understand is blatant bribery.
Also think very carefully before criticising any of their disgusting personal habits, such as your fear of being impaled on the gnarly toenail trimmings he insists on cutting when in bed but then forgets to bin. Or after using the last scrap of loo paper, he will of course hunt out a replacement roll — but is then genetically programmed to be unable to put it on the holder, preferring to balance it precariously on its cardboard predecessor instead.
Say anything negative and ‘bingo’ — they feel you’ve dented their pride and will pay you back by looking at you as if you were an alien who had just lost touch with the Mothership (which will be followed by a three-day sulk).
The fact is that men are only too aware of the exact position of the laundry basket and they know full well that they are supposed to help wash up, but they are also cunningly crafted by nature to be acutely aware that it is you who will crack first and rush in desperation to snap on the rubber gloves.
Male slovenliness is not age-, class- or race-specific, it is so universal that it can only be a product of evolution. It’s all down to an inbuilt form of energy conservation that has been passed on through the millennia, leaving modern man now able to perform only the bare minimum needed to complete any domestic task.
That said, one has to then stop and think about good old Sir Alexander Fleming: where would we be today if he had diligently washed out his dirty mugs at the end of each working day? Instead he kept them piled high and dirty atop his kitchen sink for so long that a green hairy mould sprouted forth — et voila, penicillin was invented.
On a more personal note, however, I do rather need the services of a man to rewire a light fitting in my house. Time and gravity have put paid to me being a male magnet, and the standard lure of a ‘leg over’ as an incentive is now somewhat redundant. But I do have a fall-back position: if you fancy a good bowl of chili or some cherry crumble with custard then I’m your gal. Just remember to bring along your tools.
New Wee Word
McSCUDDER (verb) To walk up or downstairs and jar your leg in the belief that there is still one more step to go.
Urine the money
STUDENT Ian Reynolds from Coventry hopes he has ended the eternal toilet seat debacle between the sexes by designing a lavatory which converts automatically at the flick of a switch to become a urinal. In the same vein, a German sanitary company has confirmed after extensive ‘in situ’ research that unless a gent sits down to pee it is impossible for him not to spray. I suppose the result of this rather intimate study undertaken in public toilets in cities such as Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfurt is actually akin to being unable to sneeze without closing one’s eyes (think about it).
Plenty more fish…
ANOTHER survey finds that 67 per cent of women still like to have doors opened for them. This reminds me of the rather brilliant response line from Emo Phillips.
One of his relationships nearly fatally floundered on the first date, due in the main to him not opening the car door for her.
His response? “I just swam to the surface.”
The Joy of Socks
DEREK Cobb, aged 25, has a serious problem that even the best shrinks in the US are unable to solve even after getting their collective heads together.
Derek has been charged with the theft of 589 pairs of ladies’ socks. He seemingly haunted the University of Maryland campus and the local shopping malls, tricking teenage girls into going barefoot by telling them he was carrying out a survey on footwear.
A police spokesman said he had no idea why Derek, a local and seemingly upright solid citizen who works in the local bank, should be so moved to such depths of depravity. I just hope that whatever good old Derek the bank teller did with his spoils was in the privacy of his own home, the naughty boy.
They’ll clean up
ISLINGTON council in London recently sent 80 caretakers on a three-day course on cleaning and mop usage. The course included tuition on cleaning walls, windows and staircases and the easy removal of offensive graffiti.
Mavis Chine, 48, from Camden, praised the course, saying: “They taught us that normal washing up liquid is best for getting floors clean, even better than the heavy duty bleach stuff. I really had my doubts about whether this course could teach me anything new about cleaning, but as a professional cleaner I did find it to be really interesting and challenging.”
Tony Lee, speaking on behalf of the council after the completion of the course, said that “people think that mopping is quite straightforward, but that is not always the case… in our course we spend one morning alone teaching how to wield a mop in conjunction with the classic figure of eight mopping motion”.
