Sponsored by
Jayne Dawson: A handbag of substance
We women spend most of our lives searching our handbags for stuff, apparently. That's why we're so under-represented in all the important institutions that run the country.
If there is an election, we can't be a candidate because we are too busy rummaging. If there are courts of justice to preside over, companies to run, financial markets to ruin, we can't because we're already fully occupied scrabbling around.
We give up our best years to delving and fumbling and foraging around for our car keys and mobile phones. And in the rare moments we're not doing that, we're dieting. Or worrying about what people think of us.
It's a wonder the human race manages to reproduce at all, we're so fully occupied. Good job we're also multi-taskers.
It's true about handbags though. Some survey worked out just recently that women spend days of their lives in fruitless search of whatever is their particular object of desire at a given moment, and I am forced to confirm that this is true.
The hunt can be for anything – a map of Paris, a spirit level, a urine sample – but usually it's your phone or your keys.
Handbags are like that. There is some law of the universe which dictates that, whatever the size, a handbag will act like a black hole, a dense black hole like the kind floating around the universe. A place where the recognised rules of being don't apply.
A handbag is a kind of anti-matter, it sucks stuff in and... that's it. There's nothing else. It just sucks stuff in.
Men find this annoying, though not as annoying as we women find it. Men even develop strategies to beat the handbag thing, like ringing us once and then, when we don't answer, ringing again a minute later – because then we will have had time to scrabble and locate.
We don't like this because, quite often, we're not even bothering to scrabble, we're just ignoring the call. If we could switch off our phone we would, obviously, but that's not possible. Because we can't find it.
This applies to all women, no matter how rich and famous. Just recently, for instance, I looked inside author Barbara Taylor Bradford's handbag. I know, what are the chances?
It's okay, I didn't steal it. Barbara, who wrote the blockbuster novel A Woman of Substance, was in the Yorkshire Evening Post building having a look round for nostalgia's sake, since she once worked on the paper, when she suddenly realised she had been separated from her handbag for quite a while and went into that tailspin we all go into when we can't immediately locate our life-support machine.
Packed
I switched on my seek-and-tidy brain cells and passed it to her (Hermes, gorgeous leather, quite heavy) and she sportingly let me have a good look inside. Let's just say there was plenty packed into that luxurious interior and if her husband Bob had called at that moment there would have been some classic scrabbling going on.
Handbag scrabbling is women's only lost-property vice though. Outside of our hand-bags, we're bang-on, we know where everything is.
Outside of our handbags, our brains are like Exocet missiles only, instead of seeking and destroying, we seek and put it in its rightful place.
This is our true burden in life – not the handbag thing, the knowing where everything is thing.
If it only applied to our own possessions, it would be bearable. But it doesn't. In fact, sometimes it can be a bit hit and miss on our own possessions.
But, unfortunately for us, our brains always know where other people have left their stuff.
Without even looking we can hunt down any object – which is of course why I knew exactly where Barbara's handbag was.
This is the real reason women find themselves sadly under-represented at the top of all of the important institutions of life – we're fully occupied telling our children and our partners where their socks/work passes/jackets are. That and the socio-economic restrictions placed on us as a result of being the childbearers and childcarers in an essentially patriarchal society, of course.
But on top of all that, we just know where things are. It's our curse. We visualise an object and, in much less time than it takes a man to helplessly look underneath a cushion, our brains have fired neural messages through lobes and across synapses.
While they are helplessly patting down their pockets, we have mentally tracked said object through every potential location, taking into consideration every possible permutation, and are able to isolate its position as being in the washing basket/on the sideboard/on-the-chair-where-you-left-it. Whatever.
So it's true about the handbag thing. We give our best years, our prime, our creme-de-la-creme years to looking for stuff inside them. But we spend the rest of our lives looking for your stuff outside them. So stop complaining that we never answer the phone.
Email to a friend
Print this page- Leeds United: Whites ponder next move in hunt for new manager LATEST
- Web poll: Who is to blame for Leeds United’s league position? VOTE HERE
- Leeds United: Time for Ken Bates and Co to listen up
- Leeds man remanded on sister murder charge UPDATED
- Leeds United: Aston Villa boss drops hint on Fabian Delph
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Leeds
Sunday 12 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 0 C to 5 C
Wind Speed: 7 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 4 C to 8 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North west
