MAN'S WORLD

MY WIFE and I have fought about many things: money, the children, what sort of telly to watch with dinner and whether or not I am, on balance, worthwhile. While we never tire of revisiting these classic arguments, we do try to find new things to fight about in order to keep our marriage fresh.

Recently we opened a new front. We've begun to fight over the mugs. I will admit I started it. It was my fault for expressing a preference in the first place. I should have kept my mouth shut. But one morning, a little hung-over, I came downstairs to find my wife drinking coffee. In my frail state, I could not keep my disappointment to myself. "Oh no!" I said. "You've got Bluey!"

Bluey is my favourite mug, although until that moment I had not even given it a name. It's a fairly ordinary mug, rather dowdy apart from a slightly rakish slope of the handle's outside edge, but it is sturdy and perfectly mug-sized. My wife's reaction was predictable. She said, "You're pathetic." Though she had never shown the slightest interest before, from then on she started using Bluey all the time. So I hid Bluey. That did not solve the problem. Once the idea that mugs could be a point of dispute had developed, the days of drinking coffee in chummy silence were over.

It's hard to believe this problem never cropped up before, as it transpires that of all the serried ranks of mugs assembled in our cupboard, only four are ever used: Bluey, the boccale di tutti boccali; Beigey, his paste- coloured cousin; Hamish, a charming mug celebrating Hamish Hamilton's paperbacks division; and the hilarious Swine Lake Dancing Pigs mug. Last week Beigey was broken in a scuffle, and competition for the three remaining "good" mugs has intensified.

Yesterday my wife put my share of the coffee into a badly chipped Home Sweet Home mug. There is no point in pretending that this slight was not intended. She was looking at the paper, smugly sipping out of Hamish. "This mug is chipped!" I shouted. She didn't even look up, because she knew perfectly well it was chipped. "Drink from the other side, you moron." "I can't," I said. "I'm left-handed." As if she didn't know. I went to the cupboard, but there were no good mugs left. My wife pointed out that there were two mugs beside the bath. She also said that Bluey was sitting in the sink, waiting to be washed up. I thought about it, but I decided that would be just a little bit obsessive.