Women's ways
Melissa Kite illy really. Although it seemed like a good idea at the time. A girls' poker evening. I forgot that trying to persuade a group of women to do anything involving a certain absence of men is like trying to get them to turn up to their own funeral.
I've tried to organise these sorts of escapade before and it has inevitably been like pulling teeth without gas. Everyone spends the night looking at their watches and fiddling furiously with their mobile phones under the table. You can hardly hear the sighs of despair above the frantic tapping of text messages to real people, i.e., men.
At 10.30 p.m. sharp the entire gathering simultaneously announces that it is absolutely shattered and whilst it has been a lovely evening it really is time to go home to bed. Five minutes later a series of men left on standby across London receive calls from girlfriends and wives to inform them that they are on their way over for an urgent, late-night romantic tryst. Frantic for affirmation after three hours in a flirtation vacuum, they descend on their menfolk with all the sexual subtlety of Sharon Stone teasing Michael Douglas with an ice pick.
Of course no woman can refuse an invitation to an all-girls' poker evening outright. You could get a name for yourself doing that. So you accept and pencil it in the diary in the same tiny, ultra-light handwriting you use for 'dentist' and 'clear credit card balance'.
Knowing all this, it was indeed foolish to go to such trouble over finger food, which my friend Catherine, the host on this occasion, duly did.
I was the first to arrive and for a good while we sat and stared at the bowls of corn snacks and wheat-free Chinese alternatives — you know, the ones that look like Tiddlywinks counters and taste like you imagine Tiddlywinks counters might taste if you baked them in the oven for a bit.
At 8.30 p.m. the excuses started pouring in. A lot of people suddenly discovered they couldn't play poker after all. Carole won the prize for stretching credulity by texting to say she was busy buying a car. What? At 9 p.m.? Who was she buying it off, Del Boy Trotter? 'I thought we were having dinner at my house'; 'My mother's just arrived from Portugal and I haven't seen her for 20 years'; 'Oh, poker! I thought you said pop over if you're at a loose end and the moon's in Scorpio ... ' On and on it went.
We ate the olives, and the nachos, and the gherkins, and indeed became so desperate that we were about to launch into the gluten-free Tiddlywinks when an idea occurred to us. It was perfect. We wondered why we hadn't thought of it before. We made the calls and the first man arrived within half an hour.
He was excellent company. We gave up on poker and embarked on a discussion about how to accommodate my giant rabbit's restroom needs should I move from a garden flat to a mews house with roof terrace. The answer, incidentally, was a sort of dumb waiter fronted by a cat-flap which would open electronically, triggered by a microchip implant, then convey the bunny upwards, another cat-flap that opened upon arrival and deposited him thereby on the roof for recreational and relief purposes.
I guess that's a whole other story. But if you want to know why women still don't rule the world, you could start at worse places than a Kensington living room on a Wednesday night with two girls and a boy talking about pet elevators.
The fact is women don't like congregating. They have a tendency to behave like Daffyd in Little Britain, clinging to the idea that they can be the 'only girl in the village'. At the thought of another one daring to appear they burst out in a fit of 'we don't want your sort around here!'.
Just as poor Daffyd only wants to be gay while nobody else is, women live in terror of displaying their femininity in a room where there are others of the same sex, as if it might explode at any moment into an orgy of needlepoint and reading from David Copperfield. If my girlfriends had turned up they would only have spent the evening belching and pretending to be Tottenham supporters.
It's an odd sort of self-hatred, this female misogyny. My friend Laura regularly professes her loathing of women in a way that would earn her a prison term if she was doing it about any other social group. Women are all stupid, dull, vicious and pointless, according to her. I had to gently state the obvious to her: 'You are one. And so am I.' She did not look best pleased.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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