On the Matter of Women.

I was in the mechanic’s way today, and excused myself with:

‘Sorry, Dave, I was miles away – thinking about a woman – woman problems...’

Now, I have noticed that whenever I say something of that sort to a man, he almost invariably jumps to the same conclusion. This is about the war of the sexes. This is about the fact that women are fickle, irrational, determined to make life awkward for you just because they can, and irredeemably incomprehensible. Any attempt to understand the female of the species is doomed to failure, and any aspiration to that end pointless.

That isn’t quite how it works with me. I’ve never made a list of all the problems I’ve had with women, but if I did I think it likely that more than half of them would be down to me. The problem is, you see, that I look for different things in the male:female connection than most men do. And because of that, I suppose I see angles on women that most men don't. Maybe that’s my tragedy.

I made no attempt to divest Dave of his delusion. Dave is a good man. I like Dave, but I think he would have found my slightly more complex view of the matter even more incomprehensible than he finds the average woman.