IF I said new Euro-MP Godfrey Bloom was welcome to peer behind my fridge any day he cared to call, I'd be on very safe ground. I've had a built-in fridge for more than 20 years.

Behind the freezer is quite another matter, but Mr Bloom was very specific about we wives needing to clean behind our fridges last week, adding that women should also be at home, with a meal waiting, when a man's work was done. As he is to serve on a Euro committee dealing with women's rights, he reckons he's going to campaign for men's rights, too.

He has a point. If the committee is about equal rights, it's his right to do so.

It's so sad to see how the women's lobby never fails to rise to the bait every time a man suggests wives - and that narrows it down a bit nowadays - should stay at home more.

Look, men are like the Duchess's sneezing baby in Alice in Wonderland, they only do it to annoy, because they know it teases. Any man with half a brain knows the horse called Housewife is away down the meadow kicking up its heels and that bolting the stable door is the usual waste of effort.

However, while we may not think our place is in the home, we do still tend to think that life should be organised in twos.

One of the feistiest twenty-somethings I know - and her male acquaintances would maintain I should have written "scariest" - complained to me that her mother was beginning to drop far-from-subtle hints about finding a nice young man and settling down.

Ooh, I didn't think her mum was quite so brave.

What had infuriated her even more was paying a visit to a schoolfriend who had got married and being given the distinct impression that the only reason she wasn't married herself was that she'd never had an offer.

Hasn't she? Come, on, I'm not her mum and I'm a devout coward, too. I didn't ask. And twenty-somethings also have a right to their private life; I would hesitate to ask my own daughter a question like that.

It has to be said, however, that it's generally mothers who put this kind of pressure on their daughters, even daughters who find that a good job and independence makes the shelf a very comfortable place to be on.

Fathers simply think about what weddings cost and don't yearn for the excuse to wear a stunning outfit anyway.

Sons, if they get a hint that it's time they "settled down" are probably still living at home and the hidden agenda is "find someone else to wash your socks and clear up your mess". No-one worries that Johnny isn't attractive or is getting too old to find someone, as they do with Jane - but Jane has a biological clock and mum's hidden agenda for her is "I'd like grandchildren".

No doubt Mr Bloom would thoroughly approve of sock washers and grandchildren.

Tell you what, though, I do admire Godfrey Bloom's wife for continuing to follow a habit which was one of the first restrictions women abandoned long before the words "women's" and "liberation" were linked.

Katie Bloom can ride side-saddle, that habit which requires the rider to wear one. For sheer feminine elegance it can't be beaten, never mind the superiority that being on a horse gives either sex, in perfectly equal quantities