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Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Improvements?
Phil Smith probes the mysterious phenomenon of why men hate decorating, whilst women just don't seem to be able to get enough of it...
The older we men get, the more we desire to simplify our lives. I dream of that clay and wattle cabin and nine bean rows in a bee-loud glade. Happiness is an allotment shed with an ancient, prolapsed armchair I share with a family of mice. The smell of Growmore and gumboots and fine dust of shed spider skins. Or the local men's club. One bare room apart from a pin-up of Miss Cleethorpes 1953 and a carpet so soused with spilt ale it sticks to your feet. ('No, he can't come home until we've peeled him off the carpet.') Both foolish men-only activities deemed hopelessly out of date and sexist in these gender blurring days.
For alas, if the Hoover flex could stretch as far as my shed, my wife would have it spring-cleaned in a flash, with tie-backs for the window and a chintz valance for the chair; everything tucked tidily away in chic maize storage baskets; Nature firmly repulsed by the smell of Glade. If they allowed women into the club instead of Haydock Park Races they'd be organising outings to Allied Carpets and Ikea.
For the truth is, all these home improvements, all this faffing about rag-dabbing the walls, glueing rafia fascia to the cupboards and constructing Marie Antoinette awnings over the bed out of MDF, are female things. Men just aren't interested. We may be roped in to screw up the dado rails but our function is subservient to the woman's creative urge - a bit like our largely insignificant role in procreation. Wam, bam, than you man. (The sound of nails being driven home, you understand).
We lie in a part of the world infested with factory shops selling furnishings and household goods. Every day you see middle-aged men grumbling and slinking along behind their wives liked flogged curs, while fleets of buses arrive with matrons from Blackpool and Batley in a fair frenzy to get their hands on the velour curtaining and leather footstools. To a male, the amount of passion that women can generate over a continental quilt or oriental throw is to be marvelled at. It far exceeds the interest they show in us. When they're told to open their eyes in that TV series, Changing Rooms, women weep. How can anyone weep over a lime-green door with chicken-wire panels and a flotsam and jettsam and bladderwrack hearth display?
It's a mystery to drive the mere male back to his potting shed to contemplate his own artlessness, his own unutterable banality. To gaze through the cobwebby window onto the drab landscape of his own unimaginative soul. For surely left to our own devices, we men would end our days perched upon a beer crate amongst the sawdust watching football, without the civilizing solace of a single dried nettle and bindweed collage to be found anywhere upon the walls.
Has it some biological function, this profound difference between the sexes which so manifests itelf in later life? Did Cro-Magnon man cherish the mate who could transform his retirement cave and make his twilight years joyful with mastodon stencils on the wall and twig chandeliers. But surely it would be too late to pass on such a valualble domesticated gene. The loins, along with all their tie-dyed loincloths would all be withered.
Perhaps it is Nature's way of unwinding the sexual clock, of driving the sexes apart. For She can have no truck with anything so unproductive as geriatric sex. It's a young man's business, this interest in home improvements. See them on a Sunday at B&Q, wicker work in their manly grasp, doing their nest-building. It's a form of sexual thralldom. Tit for tat sexual bartering. Tongued and groove boarding for sexual favours.
But passion amongst the elderly must be re-directed and we must go our separate ways. Me to my garden shed and thoughts of rampant runnerbeans. Her to her boudoir to dream of Shaker kitchens. Nature will bring us back together over the pasteboard when she needs me to help hang the new wallpaper, when we decorate the dining room for the third time this year.
What activity within your four walls causes marital disharmony?
What effect does it have on your relationship and how do you resolve the conflict?
Tell us about it in the message boards - and if anyone knows Miss Cleethorpes 1953, we want to hear about it.
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