Iron Man...

...there we were, the two of us, closely scrutinising the wares on offer, handling the goods, testing the machines. Finally, independently, our respective choices were made.

"Oh," said the young lady shop assistant. "You both want the same one do you? I'd better see if we have two of them in stock."

And off she went with a soft, yet giggling, smile as if humorously struck by the sight of the pair of us among her electricals, as it were.

A tense moment indeed! For what if she were to return announcing she had but the one? Would we two men have to go head-to-head in contest for the right to buy our new iron?

For the new iron was our mutual intent, and who said men hate shopping? (What we men actually despair of are the women folk who destroy irons by using them at too high a setting when ironing synthetics, thence depositing sticky nylon goo all over the blade of the thing!)

Ever eirenic and wanting to establish a situation-defusing human rapport with my fellow hunter-gatherer of steam irons, I turned to ask him if he too were the ironer in his household. He - a youngish, if overly portly, Asian gentleman - raised up his face in sad empathy: "Ah, yes. My wife says she cannot iron and when she does have a go makes such a terrible mess of it I have to agree with her."

The very words that would have come from my own lips had the question been posed to, rather than by, myself. For H has long professed utter ignorance in the ironing department, and whenever pressed - as it were - to prove her mettle by having a bash makes a complete hash of the thing. On purpose of course, of that I am as sure as doubtless my companion of the moment is of his own dear spouse.

Not exactly a clever trick by any measure of subtlety - not at a level of chicanery that could convincingly throw a horse race - but an effective one for all that. Five minutes of watching a treasured shirt suffer the indignity of H's feeble, yet disastrous, attempts to knock it into any wearable shape - cuffs all over the place and the front a corrugated mass of cloth - and I'm back on the case at once, with H bowing to, and bowing out before, the mighty male. (The bow hides the self-satisfied smirk, but none too well!)

Mercifully, for the sake of peace on earth and within departmental stores in N., our young lady helper was spotted returning with a pair of the chosen irons.

"There you are boys. Happy ironing," she said.

And I could tell from the knowing voice that here was a third cunning female who practiced the same dark art at home: "But Kenneth, you know you're so much better at it than I am."

A moment of some personal humiliation you might ask? Not at all, either of us would have replied. There had been a fine passage of masculine bonding 'twixt the two of us, for we knew - though unspoken - that we had each chosen the particular iron we both had because, as seasoned experts in the field, we had spotted the neat and nifty shape of the thing - simply perfectly crafted for those tricky cuffs. That was our silent pride in our art.

H would never understand either the shape or the pleasure in it we men enjoy. It's primoridial and quite gnostic. It's an iron man thing.