Who is going to be worrying about the bills that plop on the mat over the next few weeks? For once, remarkably, my own peculiar lifestyle choice – to have been richer than my husband – segues nicely into the results of the 2011 UK Census.
It found men are no longer the main breadwinners, an astonishing leap: my mum never possessed a cheque book, let alone a paid job. A leading union stated: ‘Employers need to acknowledge the fundamental importance of family-friendly policies as women continue to take on the burden of domestic work and childcare.’
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. This is like the moment at the end of the first Planet Of The Apes film when we realise, upon spying the ruin of the Statue of Liberty, that what we are looking at is the future of humankind. Not monkeys in charge, exactly, but women who have only one thing on their mind – replacing the filter in their Miele vacuum cleaner.
You see, we can’t leave these low-earning men at home because they don’t even know filters in vacuum cleaners exist. So women continue to mastermind the domestic landscape, which means the rest of us who work with them – for them, more like – have to pick up the pieces.
Ever noticed how all those female bylines above articles haranguing us about equal pay/child benefit/the MMR jab/schools/hospitals/the cost of food/at-large paedophiles/gun law/men who buy bad gifts/the fat content of things dreamed up by Jamie Oliver, Nigel Slater et al disappear – Stalin fashion – whenever there is a bank holiday on the horizon?
And it’s not just women who reach the top who are the problem – it’s the twenty- and-thirtysomethings, spoilt airheads with a misplaced sense of entitlement: you know, the ones weaned on Sex And The City. This lot are even worse, as whenever you ask them to do anything, you always get a BlackBerry message replying: ‘I have a LIFE!’ I swear I’ve had four in the past month... after asking normal things such as, ‘Please, still be at work at 4pm’.
Liz Jones says twenty and thirytsomethings weaned on Sex And The City have a misplaced sense of entitlement(Actually, you sometimes wonder if these women really do possess BlackBerrys, given the yawning silence before 10am and after 6pm. When I finally tracked down one female fashion intern who’d been refusing to answer her BlackBerry recently, she said it was broken because ‘Doves wholemeal flour had got into the casing’.)
Having a life should be what happens at weekends, or late at night. But for these young women, ‘a life’ inevitably means the cliche of a long bath – ‘I want time to get ready nicely!’ was one outraged email I got last year – or a glass of inferior wine and a date with a monosyllabic nightmare as impotent as Matthew on Downton (and killing off the only male totty on TV over Christmas was, frankly, an unimaginative cull).
Of course, I’m not talking about women in factories or cleaners, but women who fanny around with press releases, who stay in the dry all day and eat M&S salads at their desks – and why are people always grazing! We’re not cows!
Women with only half an eye on their computer screen – which is probably tuned into Ocado, anyway – now rule the roost at work and at home. It makes you wonder what exactly men have been doing all this time...
