I know I'm on dodgy ground here, but I want to begin this week with a sweeping generalisation on the difference between the sexes. As most of you will have noticed, there are a number of important variations between men and women but, biological ones apart, I believe the most important concerns the way they deal with problems. Specifically, I mean that women like to talk through problems, usually with other women, exploring situations in minute detail and sifting every nuance before (this is optional) arriving at a conclusion.
There is no time limit to this procedure. Theses and antitheses must be erected and demolished and re-erected with slight architectural variations, and the process can continue indefinitely until the conversation is interrupted by a natural disaster or by someone shouting: "For God's sake, you've been on that phonecall since January 10th."
Whereas men, faced with a problem, prefer to bypass all the exchange-of-opinion stuff and cut straight to the solution. This is even more true if there's a football match on and, as women know, there usually is.
But even if there is no game on, instant solutions will still be sought, because men are just not comfortable being in the same room as an unsolved problem. We can't help it. It's an instinct as old as the species itself - that if you let a problem fester for more than, say, five minutes, next thing you know it's the ice age and there are bears living in your cave.
Maybe this is an exaggeration, but there is documentary proof that the condition is at least as old as the bible. Take the story about Solomon, for instance, the one in which two women claim the same baby and ask him to decide the issue.
Nowadays, we know that if the women had talked it over among themselves, they would have reached an understanding. They would have become life-long friends in the process and there would have been no harm done, except probably for a humongous phone bill. (I know what you're thinking - in biblical times, they didn't have the word "humongous".) But, probably because the Bible was written by men, they went to Solomon instead, and he "solved" the problem for them by suggesting they divide the baby in two and have a half each.
I don't know about you, but that has always sounded to me like the sort of dumb-ass thing you say when you just want to get back to watching the football. Instead, thousands of years on, it is still presented as an example of Solomon's great wisdom, which only encourages men to persist with their traditional approach.
Curiously, a lot of great art is based on the female philosophy of problem-solving, even though many of the creators were men. If classic male thinking were applied, most films would be over before the opening credits. Waiting For Godot would never have made it to the stage ("Why don't they just ring Godot and ask him if he's coming?"). And the hero in Crime And Punishment would have got the electric chair in Chapter 1 ("Sorry, Raskolnikov, but there's a big game on").
Perhaps more than any other single work, Hamlet successfully synthesises the two ways of thinking, demonstrating that Shakespeare had a unique understanding of the female psyche. (Some of you male readers are thinking: yeah, that's because he wore tights. And all I can say is: grow up, fellas.)
In the full version of the play, the prince wrestles with his problems for four hours, talking them over in great detail - mostly with himself, admittedly - and torn by conflicting emotions. Then in the final scene - and it's my guess Shakespeare wrote this after a night out with the lads - everybody gets slaughtered and all the problems are solved. "The rest is silence," says the dying Hamlet, a conclusion many men in the audience will have reached four hours earlier.
Yes, when it comes to dealing with life, all men are engineers, surveying problems and identifying solutions with minimum delay. It doesn't matter whether the problem is a simple, technical one ("we'll blast that ridge with dynamite and put the railroad through there") or a complex, moral one ("well, no, we can't really afford grandmother's vital operation and, you know, we could be doing with the spare room"). The decision may not always be the correct one, but the important thing is that it's a decision. Like when there was a leak behind our washing machine recently and I quickly isolated the cause as a faulty gate valve, which I replaced. The leak got worse, so I diagnosed the problem as something else, and the leak got worse again. But I kept my cool under pressure and continued to make snap decisions based on the observable evidence until I finally arrived at the correct solution, which was to call a plumber.
This is where men are at their best. It is in the area of relationships and the emotions that the approach often founders. But even here, even when hopelessly out of our depth, men will still grope for the quick-fix solution, which is often "flowers". The unfortunate thing is that flowers sometimes work, and this only serves to pave the way for other misunderstandings later on.
Yes, the difference between male and female thinking really is one of life's great problems. And I'd love to discuss it further, but I think I'll just arrive at a conclusion now, because I have a feeling there's a game on somewhere.