Revealed: My Guilty Secret

A dreadful thing happened yesterday. My guilty secret was almost discovered.

My husband was idly opening a letter - having failed to notice that it was addressed to me. Why on earth had I left it lying on the kitchen table?

Eek! I said, hastily whipping it out of his fingers. I think that’s mine!

Husband looked puzzled. All the more so as he had already seen the tell-tale headed notepaper: Halifax Building Society.

“Why are the Halifax writing to you?” he wondered. I shrugged oh-so-carelessly. “Oh, they’re probably just trying to sell me a credit card,” I mumbled, stuffing the evidence into my mountain of vital papers. Husband gave me a suspicious look, then ambled off.

Horrors! I thought. For my husband had been about to discover that I have a stash of secret savings. So far as he is aware, all our money has been joint money for almost 20 years now. For both of us, shared money has always been symbolic: shared money means shared lives. We are in this together.

But that hasn’t stopped me from keeping a little nest egg. And the only thing that makes me feel slightly less guilty about it is that I’m not the only one. According to a poll by insurance firm Prudential, fifteen per cent of couples over 40 have a secret savings pot worth £1,037 on average. Women are more likely than men to be secret money-hoarders, with 18 per cent admitting to hiding savings averaging £1,002.

Hannah Close, a barrister friend of mine, is another member of the secret savers’ club. She has a proportion of her monthly earnings paid into a separate bank account so that she can buy things that her husband considers frivolous. “He is the type who actually checks bank statements. If he sees I’ve spent £200 on a pair of shoes, he’ll grump about it. It’s easier just to buy things behind his back. If he actually notices I’m wearing new shoes, he’s so clueless that he’ll believe that they only cost £19.99.”

This logic makes good sense to me. I would dearly love a ludicrously expensive waterproof coat and a cello. Not that I can play the cello.

More worryingly, though, 23 per cent of secret savers are keeping their own stash of cash in case they split up from their partner (which must mean that women are either less optimistic or more realistic than men when it comes to relationships). Another friend, Sian, has adopted precisely this approach. “My parents split up, and my mother was left virtually penniless. I have no intention of leaving my partner, but I think it’s sensible to plan for all possible scenarios.”

Oh dear. Is that what I’m secretly planning?

In that case, my husband will be relieved to know that my secret stash amounts to ... £67.29. Which might just about pay for a day trip to Huddersfield and back.

In a pickle

'Cheese and pickle sandwich eaters are most intelligent'. Allegedly.

People who are fond of cheese and pickle sandwiches are more likely to be intelligent, according to a survey. Believe it or not, researchers - headed by a doctor, no less - have interviewed 2,000 people in order to identify eight 'key sandwich personalities'.

As I was eating my sandwich while reading about this, I was very keen to find out what my sandwich personality might be.

Sadly, soya and linseed bread filled with spinach and chickpeas wasn't on the list, so I will never know whether I am officially an impulsive high-flyer or a sensitive homebody (actually, that combination probably means I'm a lentil-weaving hippy).

However, I do have definitive proof that the research must be deeply flawed. My husband's favourite sandwich is cheese and pickle.

Hands off my Roles

A small headline caught my eye recently. “Fathers must do chores too,” it announced. Mmm, yes, I like the idea of my husband in Marigolds, I thought.

Then I read on. According to recent research, half of all relationships suffer following the birth of a baby. Nothing new there, then. But there was more. If fathers carry on being traditional breadwinners and leave all the domestic duties to new mothers, divorce beckons. The solution? For parents to share caring and earning roles.

Hang on a moment. Share caring and earning roles? If anything is the recipe for divorce, it surely has to be shared roles.

When I became pregnant with our first child, I had a very good, well paid job which was, astonishingly, flexible enough to accommodate a baby. My husband was working part-time from home, so we had Fisher’s ideal set-up: both able to work and also both able to look after the baby and vacuum the stairs.

Fast forward. That baby is now nine, and his sister is seven. I wash, iron, make packed lunches, remember birthdays, supervise homework and piano, make supper, and don’t vacuum the stair carpet (after all that homework, there’s no time for stairs). I gave up my job seven years ago because the confusion of shared roles was more than we could all bear. My husband has turned himself into a full-time property developer, though I think he’d have turned himself into a full-time bin-man in order to escape from the chaos and detritus of the children.

And we love it that way.

For us, shared roles meant that all consistency went out of the window. Being consistent with yourself is hard enough (what exactly was the sanction for hanging Barbies out of an upstairs window?); being consistent with someone else is well-nigh impossible. Even if you agree on the big things (no to murdering one another, yes to family meals), every day with children throws up several trillion tiny-but-really-quite-significant dilemmas. Do matching socks really matter? (Husband says yes, I say no). Can a little girl climb trees in a Disney princess dress? (I say yes, husband says no). Can your son really walk to school in his underpants if he doesn’t get his uniform on now? (Oh, actually that’s the one thing we did agree on - to our son’s horror).

Shared roles also lead to two possible domestic outcomes. Either nothing gets done at all (because nobody knows whose job it is), or - worse - two people do the same jobs, meaning that one floor is spotless and the others untouched. And few things are more likely to lead to divorce than a husband putting his wife’s only decent jumper in a boil wash - except a wife tidying up the heap of scrap paper that was obviously a year’s worth of invoices filed on the floor.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all women should be corralled into the domestic sphere. It could equally be the woman who leaves for work at 6.30am while the stay-at-home father washes up, makes the beds and sorts out sibling squabbles over the blue felt-tip. If both parents work full-time, it could be the nanny who plays this role. What matters isn’t that roles be divided according to gender: it’s for them never to overlap at all.

That way we and the children all know exactly where we are. In our family, it’s very straightforward. Spiders in the bath? Daddy’s job. Vomit, dead animals, drains, and bins? Daddy’s job. Party invitations, snacks, homework, family presents? Mummy’s job. Stair cleaning? Um, nobody’s job.

Having clearly defined roles has turned out to be as important for our relationship as me shovelling the children off to bed early so we can drink Baileys and watch Match of the Day. Now that’s the one shared role that really does work.

Barbie girl

I was a teenage runaway, a joyrider, a drug dealer, a terrorist and a murderer. I had sex with scores of men (including all of Duran Duran - simultaneously) whilst never having spoken to a man who wasn’t my father; I turned a gay man straight and a straight man gay; I was detained in mental institutions; I had organ transplants; I was buried in a sand-pit; I was reincarnated as my own twin sister; I performed a strip act in a nightclub; and I lost my head when it was flushed down the toilet. I have even died of ignorance (as in that ’80s advertising campaign). And all this before my eighteenth birthday.

So how did I manage to perform these amazing feats? Well, it was all thanks to Barbie. Yes, Barbie. The glittery pink creation that all sensible modern women detest.

Whenever anyone talks about Barbie nowadays, their tone is peculiarly apologetic. It’s always the same: they tried so terribly hard to avoid it, but their daughters have simply inherited a Barbie-loving “pink gene”. These women talk earnestly about gender stereotyping and act as if Barbie were single-handedly responsible for anorexia and unnecessary boob-jobs. Germaine Greer, for one, claimed that Barbie has taught any woman whose vital statistics aren’t 38-18-34 to “despise her body”.

But such criticisms are missing the point. For Barbie isn’t just a pink’n’blonde monstrosity who teaches girls to shop and starve: on the contrary, she can teach us everything we need to know about life and love.

My sister and I had, between us, probably the national average of Barbies (around eight apiece). But our Barbies didn’t hang around looking pretty and having tea parties. Oh no. We chopped their hair off and dyed their stubble with felt-tip pens (and were disappointed to discover that Domestos didn’t bleach polyester hair). We pierced their ears with dressmaking pins, gave them chains from their ears to their noses, and added nail-varnish nipples for good measure – to the horror of our mother, who first spotted said nipples as we undressed our Barbies while playing nicely at Great Auntie Joan’s house. One had polio (caught from a too-close encounter with Ian Drury – as in the Blockheads) – and a Swizzles sweet wrapper, an elastic band, and a bit of plastic from dad’s tool-box became a calliper. Another had cholera (thanks to my reading The Secret Garden and never getting beyond the scary cholera bit). When we got really fed up with them, we resorted to crashing a Weebles aeroplane into their house (oh, we were so ahead of our time). A number of them went mad; one had her hat run over by a London taxi, and subsequently developed a fetish about exposing her bottom. Only one retained all her (long, blonde, curly) hair and limbs, and she, “Sheri”, was the token looks-obsessed bimbo who was on a permanent diet of cocaine and vodka.

Had they known what I got up to at home, my school friends would probably have thought that I was suffering from some weirdo form of arrested development. To my mind, though, what I was doing was learning about who I was and what I wanted – without any of the hideous consequences. Other girls snogged horrid teenage boys, had secret abortions, drank themselves sick, and dabbled in drugs – but I didn’t need to do any of that, because I had Barbie. She showed me how demeaning it was to have sordid liaisons in alleyways, how boring people are when they’re drunk, how wonderful it is to be in love, and how heart-wrenchingly miserable it is to be dumped by your (married or gay) boyfriend. I was testing out those different identities that the other girls – whose politically correct mothers had banned Barbie – were trying out on their own minds and bodies the minute they had the chance. “Be who you want to be”, said one rather sickly Barbie advertising campaign. But I’d say that Barbie lets you be who you don’t want to be – without any of the consequences.

I never went down the sex-with-random-strangers path, unlike many of my Barbie-free friends. I don’t go in for body piercing; binge-drinking somehow passed me by; and I’m not unduly concerned with my looks. I have no desire for an eighteen-inch waist or breast implants (and if anyone could ever do with them, it would be me). I have a splendid marriage, two lovely children, and am even considering getting an Afghan hound (well, Barbie had one). And while some might credit my parents with having brought up a happy and well rounded individual, I’d say it was all thanks to Barbie. For she let me try out every possible relationship and mode of existence, all in the safety of my own home. And for that, I shall be forever grateful to her.