Sir, - I was interested to read Kevin Myers's Irishman's Diary on women and shopping (September 23rd). It prompted me to ponder on the superiority of the male of our species. Many men of my acquaintance are indeed intellectually gifted. Most of them can easily recall who scored the winning goal in the 1971 FA Cup Final. They can usually tell you came second in the Romanian Third Division last year, and the year before. Men can, in general, grasp the complicated offside rules of any obscure new sport invented last week. This pondering led me to worry about the future of a race where one sex is so obviously superior to the other. Then I remembered that those same men usually have grave difficulty in remembering how to perform simple tasks, requiring new step-by-step instructions every time they perform them. Examples that spring to mind are switching off an oven-timer, making Chicken Kiev or, God help us, fastening the poppers on a baby's all-in-one sleepsuit (a particularly depressing sight). These men also tend to be the ones who open a refrigerator containing three pounds of Kerrygold, and whine pitifully: "We don't seem to have any butter."
These are just a few of my many thoughts on the matter. I can't share more with you as I have to pack my trunk and go shopping. Yours, etc. -
Judi Curtin, The Cloisters, North Circular Road, Limerick.