London - For me, the funniest story of the week was the emergence of Chris Martin in his true colours as a red-blooded carnivore, after his ‘conscious uncoupling’ from Hollywood’s most militant vegetarian, Gwyneth Paltrow.
What a relief it must have been for the poor fellow, after ten years nibbling away at the rabbit-food served up at home, to be free at last from the gimlet eye of the missus and able to admit that he’s partial to a bit of meat from time to time. So much for the Coldplay singer’s nomination as one of the world’s sexiest vegetarians.
Was I alone among husbands in musing guiltily on the freedoms and pleasures that might open up to the rest of us - and the true, inner selves we could unleash - if (God forbid!) the tender chains that bind us to our loved ones should come unstuck?
Let me stress at once that Mrs U rules our household with the lightest of touches. In fact, hand on heart, I can say that her regime is among the least oppressive I’ve witnessed, and when I look at some of my more downtrodden married male friends, I count myself copiously blessed.
When she goes off to church on Sunday mornings, she doesn’t drag me along with her, leaving me instead to enjoy a blissful lie-in. When I pour my first drink of the day (early, I admit, by most people’s standards), she utters not a word of rebuke, registering her disapproval only with a barely perceptible glance at her watch and a millimetre’s raising of an eyebrow.
Nor can I fault her on dietary matters. It’s true that she bans veal, out of pity for the calves, and liver, because she doesn’t like the feel of it when it’s raw. But I can get by quite happily without either. And though I suffer the odd pointed reference to my waistline, no other delicacy is off-limits. Indeed, nobody could accuse her of being a disciplinarian food faddist like the terrifying Miss Paltrow.
To come to think of it, she even puts up with my writing about the family, week after week, which is more than most flesh and blood could endure.
So, yes, I’m a very lucky man. But which of us husbands, even the most devoted among us, hasn’t just occasionally fantasised about the things we could do if only we had nobody to consider but ourselves?
One thing I know I’d do is switch off the radio immediately after the 7pm headlines and make as much noise as I damn well liked for the next 15 minutes. After 34 years of enforced silence at that sacred hour, what a liberation it would be to have nobody to hiss at me: ‘Shhhh! It’s the Archers!’
I’d turn over from the women’s tennis, too, and treat myself to box sets of all the hundreds of episodes of South Park I’ve missed because the politically incorrect cartoon’s charms seem mysteriously to leave my better half cold.
Speaking of the temperature, I’d also reset the timer on the boiler to make certain there’s enough hot water to last me through my daily shower. Mrs U’s frugality may be all very admirable but, as I must have explained 1,000 times since we went to the altar in 1980, almost any extra expense is preferable to an ice-cold drenching on a winter morning.
Then there’s that contentious matter of loading the dishwasher. If I were uncoupled like Mr Martin, I’d throw in the dirty plates and bowls wherever they happened to fit, without a flicker of fear.
Why is it that wives - mine, anyway - have elaborate and mystifying theories about what should go where, rolling their eyes and restacking the machine when their menfolk transgress their arcane rules?
Oh, all right, I admit it. This is a pretty pathetic list of the ways I’d make use of my freedom, if such a calamity were to befall me. Enough to say that the pros of being married to Mrs U so vastly outweigh the cons (I speak for myself, though obviously I can’t for her) that there’s nothing I’d hate more than becoming uncoupled, consciously or otherwise. - Daily Mail