MY dearly-beloved, sweet, charming wife says I look tired and need a rest from the column.

She says she's tired, too, of all the insults I fling at her in these pages.

All I've ever said was that the poor woman wasn't very well blessed by nature so needed all the help money could buy. What's wrong with that? And that she spends too much on clothes and sneaks her designer purchases into the house in supermarket carrier bags; and that she snores like a demented, asthmatic steam engine.

Surely she knows I was only joking, that I prefer her to my hamster (who's useless in the kitchen and still hasn't mastered the art of vacuuming).

Anyway, my dear spouse has offered to take the pressure off me and write this week's column, muttering something about revenge being sweet.

I'm sure she'll be gentle with me.

RIGHT, it's time to stand up for myself - again.

Over the past few months, my dear husband has impugned my intelligence, mocked my home-making skills, pilloried my parents, pooh-poohed my physical attributes and, all in all, made me look like a right harridan with the social graces of an orang-utan and the conversational skills of an amoeba which fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Dear reader, he only does it to impress and amuse! If for a moment I took these barbs seriously, the Evening Press would be in urgent need of a new deputy editor.

Be that as it may, I do think a little detailed refuting would be timely.

I'll pass on the 'not well blessed by nature' jibes. I may not be Michelle Pfeiffer, Julia Roberts or Rachel Weisz - but I doubt if any of them are much good at dealing with the septic tank or wrestling the ground ivy. Mind you, if he was attached to those women he'd be living in LA and have a fleet of gardeners and a pool boy and be worrying who they're about to run off with next.

I spend too much on designer clothes, do I? Others cite me as the original bargain basement shopper. It's Primark and, at a push, Bhs for me - with the occasional daring foray, even at my advanced age, into New Look. They do great shoes for a tenner.

I will admit to sneaking stuff in and claiming it's ancient, but show me a girl who doesn't and I'll ask which sealed order she belongs to. It's a female thing - is it guilt about spending our own money on ourselves even in the Oxfam shop? Or just the fun of having a secret, even a perfectly harmless one?

Then he attacked my collection of tights. Now men will never understand tights - mostly they just hate them! But women will understand. Do you EVER have the right shade for whatever outfit you plan to wear? You need an entire library of the darn things - and then they ladder, just as you think you have found the exact tint of Golden Sun. So a wise woman keeps a stock, doesn't she?

Anyway, what a case of pot and kettle. He has ties - and more ties, and suits, and waterproof outdoor gear in which to dash the 40 paces to our village pub; and as for shirts, one a day for the next two months I reckon, in every shade of every colour, a veritable shirt-glut.

I won't even go into the obsessive collection of cooking knives and assortment of Swiss army knife gadgets (where is this horse that needs its hooves cleaning out all the time?) or his compulsion with mammoth chocolate bars.

And Mr Wonderful's clothes have to hang, not be crushed up on shelves, so space is required.

Visitors exclaim: "We've never seen a man with so many wardrobes."

It's true. He has a double full-length cupboard and three-quarters of another one in the 'master' bedroom; he has a double one in the spare room.

Me? I squeeze into the one double and a measly quarter left when his 51 shirts have been lovingly ironed and coat-hangered (by him I hasten to add, I don't get the creases right in the arms... I'm not daft).

And finally, snoring. Yes, at the moment I am recovering from 'the universal cold'. However, my genteel little snufflings will disappear with time. As for him, how does a man snore even when he's lying on his face?

Updated: 08:58 Tuesday, February 01, 2005