Women hide their lights under their bonnets

THE latest missive from the barmy world of the boffins says that, contrary to popular opinion, women could be just as good as men (some men because it certainly doesn’t include me and probably not him, slumped on the sofa in front of the TV either) at maintaining the car or fixing the broken washing machine, fridge or dryer.

What utter tosh. Women don’t service the car or mend troubled domestic appliances, not because they can’t but because they don’t want to and, in any event what is that useless lump in the corner for if it’s not for keeping the car running and the white goods up to scratch?

The boffins talk about “men’s greater aptitude at mechanical tasks” which is more tosh.

Women are too smart to own up to a hidden skill as a car mechanic or any other dirty and heavy job, and see their role as that of an encouraging supervisor, offering sage advice as they sit eating chocolate in front of the fire.

Some of course call it nagging but I know my place and am not prepared to journey down that particular path to icy silence.

The boffins go on to suggest — and this is totally crackers — that women might be more inclined to get their hands dirty tackling these messy domestic chores, if they had lessons at school in car, washing machine and fridge innards.

The boffins clearly don’t live in the real world, girls’ mums would steer them to the cleaner fields of languages, literature and science and away from the oily grime under the car bonnet with the lesson that that’s what men are for.

Admit it guys, they are just too smart for us (now if that doesn’t get me some brownie points I don’t know what will).



OLDHAM Council should surely issue a list of the reasons why 152 employees were paid a total of £3 million, if only to stop mischief makers like me wondering if it was the hierarchy suffering hernias carrying their pay home, tripping over their wallets or getting food poisoning eating in three-star restaurants.
Or even an outbreak of gout among those who can afford the best things in life on our council tax.

It could, of course, be the lowly clipboard carriers on starvation wages falling down grids although anorexia hardly seems rife among the civic centre staff that I have seen running to the pie shop at lunch time.

It could, of course, be something far more exciting like the super-fat Birmingham chap who picked up £1,500 after the lavatory he was using couldn’t cope with his weight and injured him (it doesn’t say where) when it collapsed. Now that’s what you call a proper compensation culture. Proof, if indeed it was needed that all of human life inhabits our town halls and civic centres.



I CONFESS to checking the calendar to make sure that it wasn’t April 1 instead of November 1 when I read this week that teachers, who already have 13 weeks holiday a year, need sabbatical breaks during term time because the poor dears are suffering from burn-out. And this after Sir Michael Wilshaw, soon to take over as head of Ofsted, has attacked poor performing teachers and weak heads who, he says, allow schools to coast.
Most parents, who suffer stress at work and don’t get a quarter of the holidays that teachers enjoy are likely to be outraged by the call for more holidays for teachers, many of whom will be striking later on this month because they want you to pay more for their pensions than you can afford to pay for your own.

Driving across the obstacle course that is Oldham the other day, I was struck by a money-making opportunity for the strapped-for-cash council. Why not offer the town centre up to a film company as the setting for parts of T S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, the gruesome “The Rod” or the work of some of the war poets. Might as well follow the maxim, where there’s muck there’s money. If that’s the case, Oldham is sitting (if we can find anywhere to sit) on a gold mine.