We men have many weaknesses. And age only exacerbates them. Now that I have passed my 42nd birthday and am officially in the final 40 per cent of my alloted span on Earth — what Sue Townsend brilliantly alludes to as the prostate years — my infirmities are becoming ever more debilitating.

My hearing is going in the most alarming way, or so it would appear, because whenever I listen to any anyone called something like “strategic director” or “partnership working lead” or “change management professional” I cannot make out a single word they say. My eyesight is clearly failing because women called Lily Cole and Keira Knightley are held up as icons of beauty but all I can see are elongated starvelings who seem about as sexy as a case of rickets. And I am having increasing mobility problems.

Although I suspect that’s because I try, from time to time, to travel to work along what were once, rather quaintly, known as roads but which are now wildlife reserves in which tortoises, badgers, diplodoci, postmen and other slow-moving creatures can loll peaceably under the protective cover of CCTV cameras and then sleep for 18 hours on end behind the extensive fencing thoughtfully supplied by construction companies, ostensibly to keep their JCBs, picks, shovels and drills safe in the unlikely eventuality someone might want to actually wield one for longer than it takes to say Working Time Directive.

Oh, and apparently I’ve become more irascible with age, too, though I can’t see it myself.

With one exception. Nothing drives me madder than the tendency my wife has to interrupt whatever it is I’m doing, such as taking the rubbish out, with a demand that I, please, at long bloody last, take the rubbish out. This ability to issue orders that I pull my finger out when the aforementioned digit is already exposed (normally carefully tying the top of the bin bag, rabbits-ear style, to minimise spillage) winds me up more tightly than a cobra in a coke can.

I suspect the reason I’m driven mad is because one of my weaknesses is being so vividly exposed. We men know we are rubbish around the house. But when we do bestir ourselves, nothing is so wounding to our sense of dignity than the assumption that we need a constantly primed domestic satnav to keep us on track.

There is something undermining to our precious egos in being told to let the poor dog out otherwise it will burst and make sure the children wear white shirts for school this morning when Mars is already watering the begonias under a benignly watchful gaze and the fruit of one’s loins are already trimly turned out in crisp cotton.

We men like to think that, once seized of the need to perform a task, we can be left to get on with it, like Andy McNab behind Iraqi lines, practised, resourceful and benefiting from total radio silence.

Our wives on the other hand seem to think that we are like Nintendo Wii consoles — inherently slippery and only effective when gripped tightly, given a good shake and then constantly moved, nudged and thrust in the right direction.

Which takes me back to my original concern. Finding the eternal love of my life uttering what I consider to be an otiose command with what is ego-underminingly poor timing (ie, when I’m already in the middle of the job she’s begging me to start) makes me question my ability to be trusted, by those who know me best, to complete any task unsupervised. Rather than being secure in my masculinity I am just something else, like a computer peripheral, my wife needs to shunt about to get to work. Am I now a man or a mouse? I fear I know the answer...

Where men are men

I was in Crampton country at the weekend. Yorkshire’s East Riding. And visiting Hull I was struck by the scale and spaciousness of the place. Big houses. Big avenues. Big men. Drinking Big Drinks. And wearing so very little in the middle of November you could see what else was Big too.

I always wondered why Robert Crampton, all thirteen stone of Yorkshire muscle and wiry fighting power, thought of himself as a Beta male. What does that make me?

But now I know. If you come from a town where John Prescott’s a dangerously metrosexual figure you’d have to be harder than David Haye’s left hook before you thought of yourself as a truly man’s man.

Sour taste in the mouth

Why do hotels serve breakfast fruit juices in such teensy glasses? Broadly the size of a dwarf’s thimble, they make it impossible to get more than 0.00001 per cent recurring of your five a day when away from home. I know portion control is the key to profit but when you’re not even allowed to carry enough liquid back to your table to drown a gnat, and when the marmalade for your (inevitably limp and cold) toast comes in a plastic box which isn’t even big enough to make a flea’s canoe, then the only thing the hotel really generates is a vow never to return.

Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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