The fact that it’s Mary’s birthday doesn’t mean I have to spare her a firm but fair mansplanation of why I believe my wife to be, if not the world’s worst shopper, a curate’s egg of a shopper.
There are fresh lessons to be learnt daily from her better half.
First up: full marks for not going to the Co-op again. That brace of sustainably caught North Atlantic cod had about as much flavour as a Kleenex tissue.
Congrats for going to Lidl, this time, but nul points for buying asparagus spears from Peru rather than from this country, and nul points for buying a Rainforest Alliance product – peppermint tea bags. We already have real garden mint coming out of our ears in our own one-acre Nature Recovery Zone.
But, as I warmed to my theme, I was rudely interrupted – my father would have called it insubordination. Rudely, because my private education set me up to be a leader of men. It signally failed to prepare me for life in a household of assertive females.
Mary uses various code words as shorthand to shut me down when I am on what she calls a ‘mansplaining rant’. Just two words will shiver my timbers. ‘Silver splitters.’
Silver splitting is a new phenomenon among many couples of our vintage and it’s always the man who is the first to express astonishment and the woman to initiate the splitting. This two-word Oreshnik missile of a tactic has me striding in fright to my greenhouse. It’s a sharp reminder that today’s women are (unlike those of my late mother’s vintage) less willing to put up with unsatisfactory life partners, irrespective of a man’s age and/or his medical issues.
The strutting martinet/Lord of discipline/armchair general type of husband who previously ruled household roosts is no longer relevant, it appears, in 2025, in the Englishman’s home which was previously his castle.
And yet discipline is in desperately short supply in our country and particularly in its capital, thanks largely to its London Mayor. Moreover, our Walter Mitty of a prime minister
is saying we must now enter a war- footing mentality.
This despite Britons’ already enduring the cost-of-living crisis, unsafe streets and a legion of other morale-sapping skirmishes to get doctors’ appointments and see off a daily round of would-be internet scammers. We are already battling and we don’t want to get into an actual war.
My Balham-based ‘war correspondent’, Miles, sends me regular crime-incident updates from the city, which conjure up images of crumbling authority and institutions, coupled with a complete absence of bobbies on the beat.
Prefiguring Robert Jenrick, I had already received an extensive image bank of grinning, athletic passengers jumping over the exit gates at Miles’s local tube station, while supine officials watched on passively.
Today’s update shows a goat being spit-roasted in a tented encampment in Mayfair with an add-on featuring a one-litre bottle of what appeared to be Lucozade. Far from ‘aiding recovery’, it was a litre bottle of urine – allegedly one of hundreds left daily and thoughtlessly on pavements by minicab drivers. The latter image was wittily captioned by Miles, ‘Still warm!’
It’s a different story – so far – down here in the country, where courtesy and good behaviour are still considered the norm. Still, I had something of a culture shock this morning when I observed, from my shed at the bottom of the garden, a young blonde, boiler-suited woman at the wheel of a giant John Deere tractor.
She was using a huge boom to both harrow and pulverise the soil at the same time as sowing a crop of maize.
But from what I hear when drifting in and out of Mary’s workroom – she always has Talk radio blasting away – most Britons, it is clear, are currently dissatisfied with our government. Not one section of society – rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief – is happy with its performance.
What is to be done? Where to turn for leadership when our Prime Minister is absent, missing in inaction (sic), constantly globetrotting? And warmongering as well. Where are the sound Englishmen – the present- day equivalents of John Bull or William Cobbett?
It’s at times like these that I return to the much loved book England: An Anthology, compiled by the great Oldie founding editor Richard Ingrams, who can still be counted on to play the organ in his local church in Berkshire. I like to dip into this in times of desperation to remind me of what is keeping us in this septic isle at a time when so many Britons are heading for Dubai.
As Ingrams points out in his foreword, ‘The mystical response to nature runs through a great deal of our finest literature, which is generally overlooked by foreigners as they observe condescendingly the prosaic and philistine English with his incomprehensible cricket and his inedible food.’
Within seconds, my sense of national pride returns when I read the reassuring words of William Cowper’s The Task:
‘England, with all thy faults, I love thee still ... I would not exchange thy sullen skies and fields without a flow’r for warmer France with all her vines.’
