"Flirt with glamour and marry sense," my unglamorous but eminently sensible great-grandmother used to mutter - loudly - in the presence of her son, around the time he was courting a "big-boobed floozy with notions". Events this past week had me wondering: how would my great-grandmother have coped with Posh Spice as a daughter-in-law? What would she have done if her son had turned up at the do for her 67th wedding anniversary wearing a sarong, or worse, what if the daughter-in-law had revealed to the local paper that he had taken to wearing her underwear? I'm not sure she would have coped at all, but then I'm not sure Posh Spice's real mother-in-law, Alex Ferguson, is coping either. If you'd told him back in the 1970s, when he began his managerial life at East Stirling, that trials of this nature lay ahead he'd have stuck to running pubs.
We're told that a showdown between Ferguson and Posh is imminent after she claimed publicly that (a) Beckham should be earning as much as Roy Keane (which he should), (b) he should leave Manchester for somewhere sunny (which he probably should too) and (c) that he likes wearing her knickers, particularly her thongs (which he probably shouldn't, but each to his - or hers - own).
If this is true I would be prepared to drop my objections to pay-per-view TV if that were the only way of seeing live coverage of the showdown. My money would be on Posh, because Ferguson wouldn't know where to start, coming, as he does, from an era when football wives were seen and not heard.
Changed times indeed. Only this week Leeds United's Lee Bowyer was the victim of a tabloid kiss-and-tell when his former girlfriend, 21-year-old model Emma Padfield, revealed his . . . well . . . you know . . . shortcomings. The couple promptly split up, but Emma is coping reasonably well with the trauma, telling us that "I'm not fussy who I shag, just so long as he is a footballer". Now, on hearing this kind of stuff we're meant to get our hankies out for the lads and shed buckets for them because the super models they asked their agents to introduce them to in the celebs-only corner of their nearest nightclub are turning out to be feisty, publicity-hungry wives who want a little more from life than coffee mornings with other football wives in their mock Tudor mansions in deepest Essex.
Well, I'm fairly certain that if my great-grandmother were alive today she'd keep her hankie firmly tucked in her pocket and would probably say "good enough for ye, ye're well matched and ye all deserve each other". And she'd be entirely right. Did these lads choose their other halves because they were good conversationalists and wanted world peace? No. They chose them because they were either (a) a bit of alright or (b) had loadsa money, precisely the same reasons their other halves chose them.
Posh can hardly be accused of marrying Beckham for his intellect (Interviewer: "David, would it be fair to describe you as volatile?" David: "Yes, I can play almost anywhere - on the right, in the centre, on the left even.") and vice versa (Posh: "He's really deep, you know."). So, really, they're a perfect couple. The worry, of course, is that the thong revelation will make life on the English football ground circuit even more difficult for Beckham. English football fans have generally proved to be less than sympathetic on hearing of players' private habits.
But a midweek internet poll suggested that maybe the thong thing isn't such a big deal after all. Readers were asked, "What is the silliest thing David Beckham has ever worn?" and Posh's Thong only came second, behind a Man United kit.
Anyway, if the worst comes to the worst, Beckham can always write a book about his marriage split-up in a few years entitled Thongs for the Memories.
