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What do women want? This question has given a title to countless books, studies, pamphlets and themed fancy dress parties over the years.
However, in my shallow experience what women want includes, but is not limited to: toast, a cuddle, to go to Cuba, the remote, children, the bus to hurry up, me to stop reading and put the light out, a ticket to Arcadia and someone who they see less as a "brother". A mixed message, certainly.
Finally, though, those nice, selfless people at the Centre for Policy Studies (set up, lest we forget, by Keith Joseph, the one thing Torchwood couldn't stop) have published the answer in a pamphlet entitled What Women Want.
What they want, insists the CPS, is to stay at home with the kids and not be subjected to government policies designed to make it easier for them to go back to work.
Well, I don't know about you but I feel a tremendous weight has lifted.
To have the answer after all this time is wonderful, particularly as it's so absolute and unnuanced.
Now none of us has to spend any more time thinking about this niggling question - we can simply consign slightly more than half the population to a pleasingly convenient, non-threatening stereotype and get on with the real, men's business of running the world undistracted by dizzy, shoe-obsessed women reluctantly carving out careers for themselves.
Stupid. Of course women want the chance to look after their children. But then of course they also want to go out to work. And they want all the myriad other things they want, from bacon baps to quad bikes.
This is because, and I don't know if you've noticed, there are simply loads of them. Honestly, have a look. And the thing is, they have this tremendously annoying characteristic of all being a bit different.
Asking a question like "what do women want?" which demands an answer that fits three billion people is idiotic. Presuming to know the answer is either deluded or arrogant. No one bothers asking "what do men want?".
Admittedly this is because most people think they know what men want and that it's sex. True, but to stop there sells us short.
Speaking personally, I also want a full-size Dalek and some more of that delicious flapjack.
I don't want to come across all hippie but look, we're all different.
Asking and pretending to answer questions about great swathes of people at once helps no one except those looking for a grant to refute your findings and columnists with a deadline.
To quote the masterful Bill Cosby: "Sigmund Freud once said: 'What do women want?' The only thing I have learned in 52 years is that women want men to stop asking dumb questions like that."
Jamie's crusade tastes defeat
As you'll have noticed, barely a week goes by without one of Channel 4's stable of celebrity chefs tediously declaring that they're starting some campaign or other.
"Over the next six weeks I'm gonna get Britain cooking/get Britain back in touch with real food/get real Britain cooking food/really get Britain cooking food [delete as applicable]," they say.
All jolly good, but we rarely if ever get an update on how far they are getting with these schemes.
So I hope it will be useful to report some results from the front line. On Sunday morning I had breakfast in a Stafford hotel. "How would you like your egg?" asked the waiter.
"Poached, please," I replied. A sharp intake of breath. "Ooh, I don't know about poached, sir," he said, "we've got a different chef on this morning."
A way to go, gents. A way to go.
Get hip to the latest expression
Smiles are fashionable. No, no, you read that right - that isn't a weird inksmudge or a typo or, if you're reading online, some pixels gone rogue: since Paris Fashion Week earlier this month, smiles are fashionable. They are. I read it in the paper.
Perhaps you're thinking that you hadn't realised it was possible for facial expressions to go in and out of fashion. What was modish before, you might be asking.
The frown? The grimace? The Grazia-celebrity-asked-what-book-they-last-read blank look? Who knows what faux pas you may have committed?
Or possibly you might be thinking, as I am, that if such trends can exist in the wholly un-self-aware world of fashion, Western Civilisation just might have a little too much time on its hands.
• It's a classic example of double standards. A zookeeper in Gaza is hailed for his smartness after gaffer-taping a couple of donkeys to look like zebras so he could smuggle them past Israeli security.
Yet when I do the same thing to my cat so the kids and I can play "hunt the tiger" the RSPCA has to be called, apparently.
Someone tell Richard Littlejohn.
Reader views (1)
"Speaking personally, I also want a full-size Dalek and some more of that delicious flapjack. I don't want to come across all hippie but look, we're all different."
You are wrong, every man wants a full-size Dalek and some more flapjack.
- Bob Jones, Stoke, 28/10/2009 10:38
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