Saturday, March 5, 2011

"Ten things I hate about you" - from both sides


The Daily Mail has published two lists, one by Giles Coren from a male perspective, the other by Christina Hopkinson from a female viewpoint, about the trials and tribulations of relationships between the sexes. There are some wonderfully funny jibes on both sides. Here are a few examples.

Things Giles Coren hates about women:


Failing to grasp that she moults


"The shower plughole is blocked again!" she cries out from the bathroom. So again you go upstairs and pull off the plug-guard, reach into the slimy hole and pull out the hair trap which is blocked with a serious fistful of long blonde hair, all slimy and yukky with whatever’s been flowing through it the last couple of weeks.

"That’s not necessarily mine!" she says as you hold the cloggy straggle up to show its comfortable 18in length against your dark brown short back and sides.

So you show her how the hair trap works, in case she blocks it again next time she’s combing conditioner through her barnet in the shower. But all the same, a few weeks later, you’re quietly reading the paper when the despairing cry comes: "The shower’s blocked agaaaaiiin . . . "


Always leaving some awful pop music station on top volume in the car when she was the last one to drive it

So that when you get in on a cold morning to go to work, and switch the radio on expecting to hear the mellifluous mutterings of the Today programme, it instead blasts into shrieking life with some frightful oik bellowing rage into a voice-distorter over the sound of a huge drum kit being kicked down a hill by donkeys. Your day simply doesn’t recover.


Things Christina Hopkinson hates about men:


The surprisingly wiry ‘wireless’ home

One mobile phone, one charger - it’s all you need. But no, he has wires crawling round the house like vines. Then are the drawers full of old cables that look like nests of vipers. Some of them are for his first Nokia, bought circa 1995.

These phone, camera and computer chargers have joined old keys as things we can no longer throw away for fear that the moment we do so, we’ll discover a need to use them. And speaking of phones, why is he always there, with the iPhone or BlackBerry surgically attached to his hand, constantly tapping the screen with the excuse that ‘something important from work’ might have just landed in the inbox.


Saying we’ve run out of something . . . after it’s actually run out

‘We’re out of cornflakes/sugar/bread’ said in an offensively accusatory way, as he empties the last of it onto his plate. Always with the subtitle running below it of: ‘Can you go out and buy it, I’m far too busy.’ This is closely allied to the habit of putting empty food receptacles back into the cupboard or fridge, especially milk bottles. (But then, contrarily, always leaving full milk bottles out of the fridge so that the contents curdle.)


There's more at the link. Great fun, and entertaining reading.





Peter