It might be marvelous to be a man - then I could stop worrying about what's fair to women and just cheerfully assume I was superior, and that they had all been born to iron my shirts. Better still, I could be an Irish man - then I would have all the privileges of being male without giving up the right to be wayward, temperamental and an appealing minority.

And what would happen to my illusion that I am a force for order in the home if I wasn't married to the only man north of the Tiber who is even untidier than I am?

As anyone who has ever fallen foul of an airport, a conventional hospital or a bad restaurant knows, misery is made up of little things.

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

People get a bad impression of it [the English climate] by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what.

In my next life I want to be a pessimist. Then other people could spend all their time cheering me up.

a perfectly managed Christmas correct in every detail is, like basted inside seams and letters answered by return, a sure sign of someone who hasn't enough to do.