AFTER more than 28 years of marriage, you might think my wife would have got the message by now. But no.
So I am going to spell it out here, and because the same needs to be said to all other wives and long-term female partners, feel free to copy this to them and put them straight.
I say to them all: Keep your thieving hands off our dinners.
This is especially pertinent as we head for the festive period, when there is going to be a lot of food sloshing around, and the temptation to share is at its greatest.
I’m not talking about people who aren’t going to have enough to eat this Christmas, of course, just the person sat next to you who should have ordered something for herself.
I am telling guys to be firm – just as I was on Tuesday, when we treated ourselves to a visited the chip shop.
To fill the time until our order was wrapped, I traditionally order a scallop “to eat now.” In my opinion, not even the most expensive restaurant in the world could serve anything as mouth-watering or as satisfying as a big slice of potato covered in batter, so even when the person asking is my darling wife and the mother of my children, I do not take kindly to requests like: “Can I have a bite?”
The short answer is always “No,” and the long answer involves explaining, for the umpteenth time, how people who want a bite of your food are at liberty to order one of their own if they want one.
This kind of thing is even more prevalent when you get to the end of a meal out and the big decision has to be made whether to have dessert or (to give it its proper name) pudding.
This is invariably when I decide I am going to order treacle sponge after all, and this often leads to my wife announcing: “I don’t think I am going to order anything. I can have some of yours.”
Oh no you can’t. If you want pudding, Order your own.
Sometimes she will even have the nerve to ask the waitress to bring two spoons, which means I have to be firm and insist she only brings one.
There has been a worrying increase in this kind of behaviour in recent years, and it’s at its worst when a group of people go out for a curry together.
While the men are positive and choose something from the menu that they particularly like, all too often the females around the table will enter into negotiations to see who wants to share with whom.
If they had their way, the whole order would be put in the middle of the table and a free-for-all would ensue, and the ladies would all go home happy that everybody had had a lovely sharey time.
Over my dead body.
In our modern world there are not supposed to be any but the obvious biological differences between men and women, but there is no denying that when it comes to sharing food, the two sexes are poles apart.
I even have a friend who considers a man to be of questionable masculinity if he wants to share. I’m not sure why it is like this, but it probably comes down to some primeval force, left over from the time when all men were hunter-gatherers.
So, ladies, remember: this Christmas there is to be no silly sharing.
Unless, of course, you aren’t going to eat all those roast potatoes – in which case we’ll do the gentlemanly thing and take them off your hands.