Thursday 14th March

There is no doubting that the brains of Men and Women work in slightly different ways.  Women are far more adept at picking up signals, detecting subtle mood changes, and in expressing their emotions than men.  Men seem to have a wire loose when it comes to understanding other peoples moods.  Faced with a member of the opposite sex we are reduced to a quivering wreck nervously wrong-guessing our potential partners every signal.

Whether it is the millennia our ancestors spent as hunter-gatherers or the cut and thrust of business but in general men have a better understanding of time.  All generalizations are odious and there will be examples aplenty to disprove my theory.  Suffice it say in my experience it is true.  I am always aware of the time of day, and when glancing at my watch I am invariable only five or ten minutes out, but am constantly surprised by many women’s apparent astonishment that it is in fact two o’clock already.  Come to think of it very few women seem to wear a watch nowadays, especially since all mobile phones display the time, whereas, possibly clinging to an outworn habit, most men still wear one.

Confronted by a few tasks to complete I can almost always estimate correctly how long they will take, both at work and at home, and if I conclude that I cannot do them all will not attempt those that may be more time-consuming, but so often I find women’s optimistic assessment of how long things take to do to be unrealistic, and they end up leaving tasks half-finished or not even started.  They also have little consideration for other’s time.  I have worked for three women bosses, all of whom constantly turned up late for meetings, oblivious or lacking any guilt at keeping a room full of people wasting their own maybe precious time waiting for their arrival.  Many women are quite happy to keep hubby and kids waiting at the front door while they finish their make-up, fiddle with their hair, change their top for the fourth time or decide that they need to move the ornaments on their dressing table at that precise moment.

Ah, how cruel you will think me, and it is quite possible that we anal men are completely wrong and that time being a man-made concept anyway is simply a waste of time after all, and we shouldn’t worry our little brains over such trivia when making sure we look good or spending time on ourselves is so much more important.