Over the moon but still worrying about the dusting The lengths some women take to avoid the dusting E-mailed family glue from the mother ship

A report compiled by Legal & General Insurance, entitled Value of a Mum, estimates that housewives do pounds 313-worth of cooking, cleaning and child-care a week, and that even working women do 53 hours of housework. Fifty-three hours? Such cleanliness is obviously a neurotic reaction to their own genitalia. No one needs to do that much cleaning. Most housework doesn't need to be done at all, it's merely a futile attempt to counteract a chaotic and amoral universe with senseless, self-righteous order. Loosen up, gals. Life is short. And dirty.

Two radical techniques for avoiding the housework were revealed this week.

"You only caught me because I came up for air," declared a defiant woman found living as a mermaid three miles off the coast of Florida. She said she was "transitioning" to survive in water because she couldn't live on land any more. She fed on seaweed but hadn't grown a tail yet, so was still dressed in the khaki slacks, black T-shirt and trainers she'd set out in. No mirrors or hairbrushes were in evidence.

"She really couldn't see why anybody should care ... since no one had worried much before," said the coastguard officer who fished her out. It's a tempting lifestyle: no bills, no mortgage, no taxes, no laws, no shopping trips, no aggravation - apart from the occasional shark. I wonder how many other women are out there.

But if that doesn't appeal, you could always try living in outer space. Shannon Lucid is just returning from six months up there, not only the first woman to stay up so long but the first American, which is kind of surprising. But what interested Radio 4 News about her was the arrangements made for her to keep in touch with her husband and three grown-up children. Would they have worried so much about a male astronaut's letters home? But a woman must never forget her family responsibilities, even when she's not on the planet! Apparently she communicated by some form of e-mail.

The thing I like about space travel is that you can schlep around in any old duds. After the Mir/Atlantis link-up, Lucid floated through the connecting tunnel wearing a blue jump suit and woolly slippers. I'd wear long johns and big sweaters and not bother about my hair. Come to think of it, that's what I do on earth.

The Bishop of Argyll, on the other hand, seems to want to do housework. His devotion to the domestic scene is most touching. But is it front-page news? I thought Catholic priests had been defrocking themselves ever since celibacy was dreamed up. Heavens above.

It's getting as hard to believe that Violetta would give up Alfredo because of some invisible sister as it is to understand Jane Eyre's abandonment of Rochester just because he's married. Sexual relations have moved on a bit. I think it's explained by the fact that Alfredo's father keeps turning up. He's such a party-pooper, he'd drive any pair apart.

I went to Jonathan Miller's La Traviata ready and willing to be moved, but it all seemed to be about emotional impasse until the final orgasmic death as Violetta clutches the bars of her iron bedstead. Whereupon Alfredo just hugs his father, who's responsible for the whole bloody mess.

What I came out of it worrying about was armpits. Violetta had obviously shaved hers. Harriet Smith in the new Emma movie has done the same. The historical accuracy of all this hairlessness troubles me less than the fact that I always notice whether women have shaved their underarms or not shaved their underarms. Whether 'tis nobler to have hair or not, the female armpit is always a statement, and always questionable. Or am I alone in this obsession? Pity the person hung up on armpits.

There WAS much that was questionable about Emma, not least the mountain of artichokes on the dinner table: Mr Woodhouse would never have allowed it. But the real Mr Woodhouse was nowhere to be seen. Instead we got a venomous version of Victor Meldrew at the beginning, subsiding into utter placidity by the end. It's important to get him right. It's his sweetness - sweetest father in English Literature surely! - that elicits Emma's devotion, so crucial to the plot.

Weird, too, the strawberries on the hill. They all stuck straight up. Has the director ever seen real strawberries growing? They hang downwards. Hence the need for straw. But even the strawbs were preferable to looking at Juliet Stevenson's caricature of Mrs Elton. Seemed to think she was in a Dickens movie.

Just like Alfredo's father, butting in where he's not wanted, there's a judge somewhere near Norwich who's decided women in labour are not capable of making informed choices about childbirth, and ordered two women to have Caesareans against their will.

I thought medical treatment was optional, and that these days NHS patients usually have to beg for it. And on what does he base his assumption of women's incompetence? If women weren't rational during labour and delivery, the whole idiotic species would have died out. We'd be dropping babies left, right and centre and forgetting what we'd done with them. I was perfectly alert throughout labour. It was my husband who was asleep.

For 30 years I've worried about pollution. I was the first, and may still be the only, person in my family to realise that coloured toilet paper is bad for the environment. Now I buy it myself. In these 30 years we've almost completed our destruction of tigers, elephants, rhinos and whales; everything's made out of mahogany, people swim in sewage, breathe noxious air and absorb government-recommended daily doses of man-made radiation. What difference can my choice of loo paper make?