SOMEONE once said that life is too short to stuff a mushroom. Who this someone was escapes me for the moment but you will have to forgive me for not immediately rushing off to my dictionary of quotations because, quite frankly, if life is too short to stuff a mushroom, then life is definitely too short to bother looking up who said life is too short to stuff a mushroom.

Modern life whizzes by at a frantic pace and we mere mortals find ourselves in a constant whirl trying to find ways of catching up.

Why walk, we ask, when we can speed along like a demented Teletubby on a scooter; why bother to put pen to paper when we can bash out an e-mail; and why go to the trouble of stuffing a mushroom when we can probably get them at M&S along with our pre-popped peas, our pre-nibbled nibbles and our pre-sliced, pre-diced, pre-cooked, pre-digested mini microwave meals for one.

Occasionally, however, it is nice to forget that we are all marvellously efficient modern women with meetings to go to and classes to take and remember what it feels like to slow down, to take a deep breath and to enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

For me, a simple pleasure is baking bread. Making fresh loaves every day would, I imagine, soon become a tiresome chore, but occasionally getting elbow deep in flour is an extremely therapeutic experience. Maybe it's the kneading, maybe it's the trance-inducing aroma or maybe it's just the heat of the kitchen, but at the end of a baking binge I feel refreshed, relaxed and ready to get back to real life.

I have my career (yes, that is what I euphemistically call this), my family and a bit of spare time (usually about half an hour every other Thursday) which I make the most of.

In other words, while I wouldn't say no to a couple of extra hours a day, I'm generally pretty happy with my lot.

Some women, however, are not satisfied with having a career, a family and the occasional loaf of home-baked bread. They want a career, a family and three-course, home-cooked meals every week night with dinner parties for 20 at the weekend.

These women are, of course, the dreaded 'domestic goddesses' who long to live life a la Lawson (Nigella that is, not her now pocket-sized father) but who usually end up in a devilishly bad temper when they discover that it is not as easy as she makes it look.

A recent survey revealed that the shining example set by the annoyingly perky Miss Lawson in her book How To Be A Domestic Goddess has in fact left many women feeling dispirited, exhausted and resentful.

Fewer than 100 of the 3,000 questioned claimed to have attained domestic goddess status, and they were probably embroidering the truth a little (well, embroidery is an essential skill for a modern have-it-all gal to have).

Even Nige herself has admitted that being a goddess isn't all that it's cracked up to be. "I would be exhausted if I tried to live up to that image," she said in an interview with the Daily Mail. "It's not the real me."

So if the original have-it-all domestic deity can't hack it, where does that leave the rest of us?

The simple truth is that we can't have it all all the time. We can have a career and a family and we can bake a cake or whip up a mouth-watering meal, but we can't do it all every day.

We have only just managed to shake off the 'superwomen' label of the 1980s and 90s, so why burden ourselves with yet another unrealistic and ultimately meaningless tag? Life is simply too short. Anyway, I'd better crack on I suppose: those mushrooms won't stuff themselves you know. Unfortunately neither will Nigella.