Forget adultery, it's slurping the soup that drives us to divorce One galling aspect of British divorce procedure is the frequent requirement for one spouse to cite "unreasonable behaviour" as grounds for severance. What textbook could be vast enough to contain all the variants of human behaviour that could be considered unreasonable? I know people who find the way their other half slurps soup more maddening than adultery. Thus 50-year-old Susan Rae found her marriage ended on the grounds that she and her husband, Alan, had a turf war over the washing-machine and rowed over his fondness for "intensively farmed meats." Mrs Rae went to the Appeal Court this week to contest (unsuccessfully) the notion that "normal squabbling between a husband and wife" could be deemed sufficient cause to end a long union. While I have huge sympathy, I think it's often the straws that break the marital camel's back. My husband copes admirably with my chronic lateness and domestic truancy, but explodes at my inability to screw the lid back on the marmalade properly. I can accommodate the fact that he hasn't accompanied me to a party since 1995, but am demented by his determination to hide the back-door keys so securely that only Sherlock Holmes could locate them. The Raes" petty warfare is as nothing compared with my household's skirmishes over the car's anti-theft device - an instrument of torture that might as well be a chastity belt for all the strife it causes. My husband bought this cumbersome device (which secures the steering wheel to the brake), in 1991 and cites it as the reason we have never had motors stolen. My firm sense is that nobody bothers nicking our cars because we have always driven battered old Fords and live in affluent Cambridge, where every other vehicle is an Audi. I fume at the hideous lump of metal that costs me precious minutes every journey as I fumble for the key. And now we have a thrilling new spat over the wi-fi. I turn it on, he turns it off while I'm mid-email, you get the picture. One thing I would say, however, in defence of unreasonable conduct: I simply cannot think what all those reasonable husbands and wives find to talk about. Another reason my husband tolerates me, I suspect, is that he's used to wayward types. Strange to relate of a man who plays Bach for pass the parcel, my upright, tweedy spouse worked on the New Musical Express in its 1970s" heyday when drug abuse was rife and egos titanic. This didn't have much effect on me until we bumped into a man of the Nick Hornby ilk, who said, "Did you write that article about..." and quoted two entire paragraphs of a review of a Roxy Music album. It was only then that I grasped the impact the NME had had on a generation of music lovers. Since then umpteen emotional men have told me my husband's review of Apocalypse Now caused Francis Ford Coppola to say at a press conference: "Only one critic in the world understands this movie." Now Pat Long's History of the NME has been published to mark its 60th birthday and doubtless hip old gunslingers will trundle out to air their views. This will give my husband the chance to shake his head and say: "I never understand why any man over the age of 50 thinks a black turtleneck is a good look." My son's primary school sent out a plea for parents to volunteer for classroom duty. They needed five adults to help with sewing and five more to be interviewed about their jobs. On Monday, I arrived to thread needles and found four other mummies dotted round the classroom. The next morning, four fathers and one lone bluestocking turned up to talk about work. The school may wage war against gender stereotypes, but it seems the mums and dads are not yet on message.