Ever been nagged?

How odd that it's always a woman who nags and never a man. A woman is always an unreasonable, over-persistent, pain in the arse while a man is merely mentioning something that needs attention.

A woman who has to keep pestering her man to get off his butt and do some necessary domestic chores is seen as a nag, while a man who pesters a woman to look sexier or be stricter with the kids is just the voice of common sense.

Well, that's the popular stereotype anyway. But have you ever heard of a nagging husband? A husband who's demanding maybe, or fussy or pedantic. But not one who's a "nag", with all the insulting overtones that implies.

It struck me that one reason Jenny and I still get along so well is that neither of us nags. If there's something about the other person that bugs us, we'll mention it but we won't bang on about it. Either the other person responds or they don't, and that's that. Or we don't mention it at all because it's not that important, or it's purely a question of personal taste.

Nagging is usually counter-productive anyway. The more you nag someone about something, the more you get their back up and the less likely you are to achieve anything.

To my mind, if a woman "nags", there's often a very good reason for it. Like a man who always "forgets" to do the food shopping, or is forever "running late" for everything, or "doesn't have the time" to get the leaky tap fixed. But he has plenty of time to update Facebook or read the sports news. She's not "nagging", she just wants him to pull his weight and not keep taking the piss.

Not so much nagging as getting a grip.

Not slobbing out

Being jobless, I feel I should be taking the opportunity to slob out and go to seed like your normal bloke.

You know, crawl out of bed at noon with a hangover, grab some pizza and a six-pack and slump in front of the telly watching the darts or the footie, belching occasionally. If the phone rings, I just say "Sorry mate, he's dead" and collapse back on to the sofa.

But being a liberated, reconstructed, new-age, feminist sort of guy, I'm incapable of being so degenerate and stereotypically masculine.

So I jump out of bed at 7.30 and after a healthy, nutritious breakfast I'm moving briskly round the house doing all those domestic chores that Jenny, being a ridiculously overworked lecturer, has little time for.

Renew the road tax? Done. Pay the bills? Say no more. Defrost the fridge? Rightaway. Call the plumber? No sweat. I'm incapable of the slatternly male thing of letting everything pile up until the house looks like a burglary hit it. Too much disorder and my brain starts clogging up and I hyperventilate.

If I'm on top of the household chores, then a bit of Me time is called for. And that doesn't mean flicking through GQ or John Grisham. I'm a liberated man, remember, so nothing less than serious cultural self-improvement will do. In other words, Booker prizewinners, new-wave cinema, cutting-edge art, that sort of thing. Serious brain-stretching, if you please, no gossip mags anywhere in sight.

No, slobbing out just doesn't come naturally. I've tried my best. I've had a go at slumping on the sofa, or dropping my dirty clothes on the floor, or leaving the washing-up for a week. But somehow it simply isn't me. I feel more like a character from Shameless* than the Nick I know and love. The fact is that I've been brought up to be tidy and conscientious and it's not a habit I can break easily.

*Shameless: a British TV series about the dysfunctional Frank Gallagher and his nine children, who live on a Manchester council estate.