Well, that was quick. The latest addition to the Hovel's personnel, my good friend K -- , has decided that, on balance, the place is not for her. She stayed, in total, about four or five nights; she spent the rest of the time with friends in the country. Whether this was down to her own painful circumstances, or a reaction to male tolerance of squalor, I do not know (we haven't discussed the matter), but Razors and I are feeling culpable, and sheepish. We have done guilt-inducingly well out of it - she's left us, pro tem, a flat-screen telly, some stylish dining chairs and a globe that opens up and becomes a sort of drinks trolley - but we feel we have failed a test.

For there are differences between men and women. To think there was a time when it was orthodoxy to claim that there was none! There's a nice line in Victoria Coren's excellent book about poker which, addressing this matter, points out that women do not take a pint of milk out of the fridge, sniff it, make a face, and then put it back in. But men do. When I read that, it was as if someone had switched on a light. How often, I asked myself, had I done that? And why? Answers, respectively: countless, and I haven't the foggiest, unless it has something to do with a reluctance to make life difficult for oneself in the short term. And who knows? Maybe it'll smell better tomorrow.

Actually, the Hovel isn't too disgusting these days. Or not as it was. When I first arrived, there was an Australian computer guy called Greg living here who had an extremely laid-back approach to washing up. Razors tells me that the system used to be for the plates to pile up in the sink for a
week, and then letting the cleaning lady take care of them on Fridays. That's no longer the case. Leaving the washing-up for the cleaning lady leaves her less time to be horrified and depressed by the state of my room.

(I have to qualify that "isn't too disgusting these days" - the place is a shambles at the moment, because I write on a Monday, the day after the fortnightly visit from the kids. I can't quite believe how much chaos three children aged between nine and 14 can cause, particularly when you don't have a dishwasher. You don't notice it so much when you live full-time with them, because it's continuous and all around you, but when they only turn up on alternate weekends, you really see the difference. That's one side effect of marital disaster that no one warned me about.)

We had been looking forward to K -- 's tenancy exactly because she was a woman, and therefore different, and therefore able to supply us with a different perspective on things. There are times when the Hovel gets a little testosterone-heavy for my liking, and when I catch myself laughing at a quip by Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear, I realise that I am going down a slope with a very murky destination at the bottom.

What women think
I prefer the company of women to that of men, as a rule. For one thing, they're more interesting to talk to, as long as you keep them off fashion. (Even then, you can get some very good advice, such as: if you are going to buy a Crombie overcoat, it must fit perfectly.) And they're really good at giving advice on how to deal with other women.

Such advice as is given is never the same from two different people (basically, it's either along the lines of "Bombard her with letters" or "Don't make any contact for at least three days"), and so could be said to be of debatable or even risky utility. The thing is, they love being asked for advice about their sex by men, precisely, I suspect, because a) they love casting judgement, and b) it is their pet topic. It's like meeting a nuclear physicist at a party - a nuclear physicist who really, really, likes nuclear physics, not one of those nuclear physicists who's not really into it and wishes he'd been a driving instructor or a cheesemonger instead - and expressing a more than mild or polite interest in nuclear physics. You will get to hear stuff, at fascinating length, about nuclear physics that you would never have imagined, and you never know when the knowledge will come in handy.

Anyway, K -- , come back whenever you like. You'll always be welcome. And we'll get our shit together, honest.

Nicholas Lezard's column appears weekly

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