Man about the house

Morrison, was not the most plausible candidate as a prospective bigamist. (And in fact she stayed single not least because

her heart belonged to Partick

Thistle.) But she did opine that any self-respecting woman wishing to make a go of a long-term relationship with the other sex ought really to be thinking about moving in two men.

The first would function in the more mundane role of house husband and would be selected for durability, reliability, sobriety, and a lack of inhibition in the matter of cleaning loos, ovens, and blocked sinks. He would be permitted more or less a free run of the premises provided these, and other necessary domestic functions were performed on time and with a semblance of civility.

The second selection, said Effie, should be kept in a suitable cupboard space and programmed for intermittent use only. The second only required to have sex appeal, devastating good looks, and an uncanny ability to know when and how you would like some boudoir-based recreation. (She did in fact have an actor colleague in mind for the second role, but as he's still treading the Scottish boards, it might be best to spare his blushes.) Now if an idea has any real merit it will last. And so it is that many long years after Effie's departure to the final Green Room that the Americans have wisely and cleverly marketed her strategy, with a few modifications.

So successful have the Rent-A-Husband agencies become, that one is to open in Britain. Surely one will hardly be enough to satisfy demand. The deal is that for #20 an hour a gent will be dispatched round your way to mop up all these little chores that your life partner would have got around to when peace breaks out in the middle east or Nasa lands on Mars, whichever comes sooner.

This cheerful chappie will attend to your every modest whim from doing the weekly shop, to excavating the back of the sofa for escapees from the Chinese carryout.

He will fix plugs, shelves, stereos, herb gardens, and the overhead extractor. Services of a more intimate nature are not, however, on the menu

which is fair enough since, if you want to have sex with someone who also Hoovers the living room, then you can stick with the permanent man in your life - a man who is by now inured to the fact that you wear laddered tights under jeans and run an underwear drawer which looks like a ransacked Oxfam store.

For in truth it's not so much the fact that you're hiring a fella which has made this agency thrive, it's the fact that very few working women have ever cracked the conundrum of running jobs, kids, husbands, and supermarkets simultaneously.

Only the mega-rich or the excessively well-organised find ways to keep all those wagons on track at once. Younger women may boast that they have stumbled on that rare gem - New Man - but in my experience these are guys who will spend two hours baking bread and reading recipe books when they could be doing something really useful

like finding where the dog put

the trainers.

New men also have a worrying tendency to go off and bond in the woods of a weekend - the very weekend as it happens that you had them down for some heavy-duty horticulture. They can also meditate clear through an entire washing and ironing cycle.

There is a parallel agency now operating - also imported from the States - which lets you hire a woman who will, in essence, become your life-support system.

She does all the things which are generally left over at the end of your day, like picking up the dry-cleaning and the re-shod shoes and remembering the loo rolls and soap powder. Such services do not come cheaply of course, not least since this new breed of skivvy does the rounds in a BMW, her checklist resides in an electronic organiser, and she fixes/ cancels your hair appointment on

her mobile.

But the Americans have pressed a clever button here - they know that the most sought-after commodity in the world is now time, especially for those who run out of day halfway down the must-do list. They also know that the things which slip to the bottom of this agenda are the tacky or finicky or tedious chores.

There is however a law of diminishing returns liable to kick in. Doubtless nineties woman will get to the stage where she works all the hours God sends in order to hire someone else to do the jobs she is home too late to tackle. And some of the shine is taken off the notion of a smiling, well-groomed bloke with chiselled jaw and macho apron turning up to transform your lifestyle, if you have to be out working at the time in order to afford him. And if you plump for executive skivvy instead, the sight of an immaculately- groomed, 8st superwoman effortlessly doing that which you have c

omprehensively fouled up might induce sentiments of a less than sisterly nature.

Not even to mention adding to that ever-overflowing receptacle, the weekly guilt quotient.

I am advised, by the way, that there are also other firms out there in the marketplace where women can hire men for chores which are not remotely domestic, but this is not that kind of a column.

Suffice it to say that the notion of renting a man for what might be termed more nocturnal purposes must surely be a rich source of potential humiliation.

It's one thing the husband having a headache . . . but the hired hand?