"Darling, would you mind if I dialled Rent-a-Hubby?"

 
Look. If I’m going to write an honest column, I have to tell it like it is. The vendors who sell this magazine may have no homes to go to at all, but I need to get the bad news out there straightaway, in the first paragraph. I have two.

There. Now we can move on – to the fact that I also have three children, a dog and a husband. You might imagine that when it comes to maintaining two homes this would be an advantage (the husband, not the children or the dog). Reader, you would be wrong.

It is true that when it came to the actual buying of the houses in question, my husband’s careful approach to the pennies helped. He has always been better at money than me, and ‘joked’ that I wrote the books and he wrote the cheques. We have another ‘joke’ at home. Whenever gutters need clearing, nettles strimmed, drains unblocked and so on, I give my perfect husband a look. He is impervious to this look, even after 20 years.

“We need a real man to do it,” he says cheerfully. If I dare to approach him directly (or as he calls it, “bullying” or “nagging”) in the hope of getting him to perform some manly chore, he will merely chant: “It is the duty of the wealthy man… to give employment to the artisan.”

In fact, he has made it his urgent business not to know where anything is or how anything works, and if asked to do something, he makes sure that in the accomplishment of the simple task there will be at least one row and two conversations in which I have to supply a telephone number of the longstanding tradesman/plumber/doctor (he does not keep telephone numbers in case I ask him to call people) and/or detailed instructions.

A week ago I asked him to get the sizzling bacon out of the Aga. He still did not know which was the roasting and which was the warming oven. When I asked him to cut some wisteria back his first port of call was my father’s house next door.

“But you’ve got a ladder,” my father said. My father was right. We do have a ladder. It’s in the barn where I keep all the tools and implements.

My husband did not know that, presumably because he has never had cause to use any of them. Now, I could feel cross about this, I suppose, but I love him very much. Plus he goes out to work every day and has done all through our 20-year marriage.
And it is reassuring to find out that I’m not alone in having a house, a husband, but not a house-husband.

A flyer came through my door the other day advertising the services of an outfit called Rent-a-Hubby, confirming what I had long suspected. For women working the double shift (ie, doing the kids and a job too), far from galvanising husbands into action, it has somehow paralysed them into inertia.

As nature abhors a vacuum and entrepreneurs love a gap in the market, lo, handyman/oddjob services on bikes and white vans now abound for households minus husbands who, for whatever reason, do not do or are unwilling to do little jobs in the home.

If you go online, you can see that the deficit of Mr Fix Its has spread throughout the first world. Which leads us to a worrying thought: What if – it’s not that husbands don’t want to do the fuse-changing and fanbelt side of of things, but they can’t?

So while women have had to multi-task and pick up skills (make white sauce while preparing a PowerPoint presentation, etc) men have somehow lost – or have not been taught – the skills to do the stuff they used to do as part of their job description.

We must look further at this another time. I might just conclude for the moment on an upnote and reveal that my husband has recently mended a lamp in our second home, and did change a tyre in the last millennium.

Rachel is editor-in-chief of The Lady
If you have any comments please tweet Rachel at: @RachelSJohnson