One wrong word and you’re off the trolley

Mar 28 2008 by Bill Oldfield, The Journal

I KNOW I’m a useless husband but, in mitigation, it’s not my fault. It’s my genes. At least I hope it is – and that there’s not something terribly wrong with me.

For instance, I don’t know the correct answer to “How do I look?” when actually the honest response might be “Not terribly good,” but the most apt one would be . . . Well, what should it be?

And I don’t understand the importance of birthdays and anniversaries.

After all, every day’s a celebration, isn’t it? Surely I wake up each day full of joy at being alive as well as married for another 24 hours to my darling wife? So why would one day of the year have to be more important, cost me money and make me have to go shopping for I don’t know what?

Before you think I’m an old scrooge you must remember that I buy my round, make the meals, put up shelves, cut the lawn, provide witty banter and do the map reading. My wife can actually cook very well and has quite a line in amusing conversation (usually at my expense) but as for the rest of the list she’s sadly inadequate. Or at least pretends to be.

But apart from not knowing the answers to fiendishly difficult questions, a wife might ask her spouse, the other great mystery of life is that, despite being unable to decipher an Ordinance Survey or basic road map, how does my wife find her way unerringly to the baked beans in the supermarket?

I can only assume it’s the years of practice put in by her, her mother and her mother’s mother into the modern leisure pursuit of shopping. Because surely she can’t be that much more intelligent than me. Can she?

I can read a map without turning it upside down, despite heading south, and confidently predict each bend in the road and junction. But I can’t find the tinned tomatoes – and of course I’m not going to ask. I’m a man for goodness’ sake.

And being a man, I’m also programmed to like gadgets. So maybe the latest by a company called Media Cart is the one for me and all my fellow male sufferers. In essence, it’s a mini sat-nav that sits on your shopping trolley, and “to help shoppers locate a product the trolley offers a locator service using voice recognition”, said a spokesman for the company.

It seems you simply tell your trolley what you want and it shows you the way to go. “Eggs?” you’ll mutter self-consciously. “Proceed 10 metres and then turn right,” will say a soothing – and I predict female – voice. Brilliant.

I can see a flaw. Based on the inability of my voice-activated phone to recognise most of my friends’ names I have a vision of red-faced men screaming into their trolleys. I mean, do we all know how to pronounce Prosciutto or Caerphilly?

But maybe this little invention will help cure at least one of my many failings. I’m not completely useless, of course. I can at least read a map to get me to the shops. Funny how my wife never seems to find that a problem. Here’s a thought: maybe I could get one of these gadgets to show her where the lawnmower is.