'Men know why stamping on someone's head is not only legal but approved'

IDON'T agree with the "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" nonsense. Even if I can't make a hospital-corners bed or iron without wrinkles I can make the effort. I know what Marigolds are, clean a mean bathroom and vacuum cares away.

But even within a fair division of labour relationship there must be room for different lines of expertise. For our purposes - that's right, mine - I merely note that it is important for the maintenance of social order and future of civilisation for men to know the most recent football scores. Hard to explain how we do it, but at a glance or hearing we take them in as if by osmosis and can reproduce them on demand.

It is also important for us to know the offside law in football, as far as that is possible when most commentators and referees have trouble, and the even knottier offside law in rugby. Not to mention the difference between ruck and maul and why stamping on someone's head is not only legal but approved.

Then there is the leg before wicket rule in cricket; Test match, one-day and Twenty20 scores; the game's history, records and statistics.

I have drawn the line at trying to explain baseball. Red-eyed at breakfast after five hours with Channel 5's World Series final coverage - I know, only Americans could call a national final a world event - is not the time to explain MVPs, RBIs, bunts, walks, strike-outs and why a batting average of 0.4 is good.

Or to mention that Sir Alex Ferguson and many other football club managers in Britain are amateurs in the open-mouthed gum-chomping stakes compared with American baseball coaches, men who use bubblegum in industrial quantities with most of it on view. And everyone spits in baseball. Even the mascot.

Not, to be honest, that anyone in our small breakfast circle of two asked whether the Red Sox had beaten the Rockies. In the same way I seldom ask how to differentiate between two duvet covers with apparently identical patterns or how Boots discount vouchers work.

Not that I'm not interested, and Liz explains it in simple terms. But I still don't understand how Boots can offer customers 50% off, two-for-one, three-for-two with extra points, vouchers on your vouchers and a free gift for staying sane, and still make a profit.

Travel directions and the weather forecast fall into my white sound category. After "Turn left at the bottom... " and "Tomorrow we can expect weather... " my mind goes blank.

Liz, heroically, makes a better fist of sport than I do with toiletries or duvet covers. As for house and garden colour schemes and clothes, I can do no more than report the facts:

Liz: "Does this skirt go with these shoes?"

Me: "With my sense of colour co-ordination and dress sense why are you asking me?"

Liz: "Because you're the only one here."

Wait until she wants to know who was the last English batsman to score a triple century in a Test match or Scotland's leading goal scorer in the past calendar year. Not that I'm holding my breath.