Husbands

Toby Young, writing in The Spectator says that fathers have become second-class citizens. Once there was nothing of a domestic nature to bother them; now they are expected to help with household chores, especially those having to do with their children. He says: "Proposing that men and women should embrace more traditional roles is akin to announcing that you've just joined the BNP."
It made me think of Agatha Christie's father. She wrote about him in her autobiography (almost as boring a book as Enid Blyton's - why is that commercially successful writers are such bores when it come to writing the truth), how he would leave the home every morning in his large chaufered car (probably a Rolls) and go to his club. For the day! His "work" seemed to consist of reading the stocks and shares. He was hardly ever home.
I knew a man some twenty years ago who lived in Cardiff but was a lecturer in a university near London. He would leave home Monday morning to go to his college and return home on the following Friday. But he never went straight home, O no: a few pints in a pub close by before he arrived home - after the kids had gone to bed! His wife eventually had an affair and divorced him.
He was not at all typical of those husbands you see in adverts on TV: the wife is efficient, attractive, on top of things, then you see the bumbling husband doing every simple task ineptly, breaking things, falling about... and the wife rolls her eyes and smiles - or, rather, smirks.
The bumbling husband brings Mr Bumble himself to mind: when he discovered that though his wife had been at fault over something it was he who, by law, would be responsible.
"The law supposes that your wife acts under your direction," he is told.
Bumble replies: "If the law supposes that, the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor."