So how's the working woman?" asked Lucy, echoing the sarcasm of her husband, Richard.

Richard mocks Lucy's friends' efforts to contribute to the family income/fabric of society by sticking his tongue so far in his cheek when he refers to them as the "working women" that it's in danger of popping out the other side.

"Working," I said, as politely as I could, since Lucy had shown up on the doorstep while I was trying write a piece for a women's magazine (about describing what has traditionally been seen as woman's work - eg housework and childcare - in more masculine terms to get men to share it equally).

"Time for a quick coffee?" asked Lucy, which I knew from previous experience meant "I'm coming in, you're going to make coffee and you'll probably end up making me lunch, too, because I've got nothing in particular to do today and am really a bit bored with having such a rich husband that there's absolutely no need for me to do anything, other than go to the gym and attend school committee meetings every now and then. So I want to hear about my 'working women' friends' lives instead."

"It'll have to be quick," I said, giving in and putting the kettle on. "I'm in the middle of a piece which has got to be finished by lunchtime. Yesterday lunchtime, in fact."

"That's fine," said Lucy. "I'm supposed to be at the gym at 11 anyway. There's a new personal trainer there who's going to work my glutes today."

"Black or white?" I asked, referring to the coffee but which Lucy obviously thought was a reference to the new personal trainer.

"Golden really," she said, dreamily. "His father is British but his mother's mother was Trinidadian, which has proved a very successful gene combination ..."

"Oh, I see what you mean," she added, looking up and seeing I was holding a cup of coffee and bottle of milk with a questioning look which said "do you want me to pour this milk into your coffee or not?"

"Black, please," she added, taking a packet of sweeteners out of her bag to make the coffee palatable without making her "glutes" unpalatable to golden boy.

"So what are you working on today?" she asked, tempting me to reply "abdominals" were it not so obviously untrue.

"I'm writing a piece about the effects of mass, pressure and heat on the fluidity of certain materials," I told her.

"That sounds very technical," she said. "Is it for some sort of trade publication?"

"No, the usual women's mag." I replied. "It's a process which generally follows the immersion of items in liquids of varying temperatures according to the density of the composition of the material in question."

Lucy looked at me with suspicion and downed her coffee with such speed that I was tempted not to enlighten her, as the effect of above remarks seemed to be to make her want to leave. But she was my friend.

"In other words, washing and ironing," I said. "It's something I've been working on since Thomas decided using a turbo dynamic bagless vacuum cleaner, which sucks at 160 something-or-others per second made vacuuming an acceptable male task."

"I thought the place looked cleaner than usual," said my "friend".

Which signalled it was time for her to go.