Wednesday 25th July

We are often accused of being anal, we do tend to love spreadsheets, ‘Excel’ rather than ‘Word’, and we receive the most incredulous looks if we suggest applying logic to a problem rather than intuition, which we men consider nothing short of guesswork.  That doesn’t make us wrong, girls, just different, but certain jobs do unfortunately require thinking in straight lines; bricklaying, painting doors and using a Karcher for instance.  How many times have I had to gently remove a paintbrush from the hands of an erratic woman and suggest she makes the tea, while I repaint the scattergun strokes she has so far mullah’ed the paintwork with.  I know it is boring to go up and down and keep to narrow bands as you cover the door with neat vertical brushstrokes, but we are not asking for a Picasso or, heaven help us – a Tracey Emin – here, we are asking for a uniform finish, and straight lines are unfortunately called for.  Outside the house is a brickwork parking space, which has become overgrown with weeds and dirt growing between the bricks.  Unsurprisingly the bricks are arranged in a neat pattern of rows.  This uniformity had no effect on the female mind which grasped the Karcher nozzle out of my hands and proceeded to spray this brick here and then that one there, squiggly lines of clean brick appearing like a madman’s doodles.  Having retrieved control of the nozzle I proceeded to work in rows from the front door to the pavement, cleaning each brick in the row in turn and gently teasing the scum and water towards the gutter, leaving neat rows of uniform colour bricks.  It does make one slightly nervous to think of all these women now in the armed forces having their fingers on machine gun triggers, but hopefully they have had this scattergun approach knocked out of them.  And despite the eternal complaints about men standing up to pee, thank God women do not have penises.