Hide under my invisible cloak of domesticity

To supplement the Turkey Twizzler portion of my reading diet, I always take an unabashedly trashy novel with me to the gym to read while I pedal on the stationary bike. It works fine: (a) a novel is practically nerdy in an environment awash with Vogue magazines, Daily Mail tabloids and ringing with Black-Eyed Peas' "My Humps" lyrics; and (b) I get a vague sense of being human in that I'm actually reading something that has a plot and not written by a dead European intellectual.

The trashy novel du jour is Joanna Trollope's Other People's Children - her books (yes, plural - I've actually read more than one - hey, they really aren't that bad) actually give a fine insight of English village life, and I'm all for anything that can give me fine insights of the English - from CP Snow to Muriel Sparks to John Mortimer. Apropos to nothing, a particular paragraph from the book caught my eye yesterday:

There was something else, another wanting, the desire, from the position of being a single, professional woman, for the peculiar domestic power of the married female: the presiding, the organizing, the quiet, subliminal dictatorship of laundry and Christmas turkeys and frequency of guests, the knowledge that one's own decision-making - based, very largely, on what one did and didn't like - lay at the heart of the things.

It took me a year, but I've finally learnt to manage a household as efficiently as the next houseproud matriarch. I know exactly when the cumin has run out, when the milk will expire, which vegetables in the fridge need to be cooked first before they rot, I can make my rounds in the supermarket blindfold, I can skin and chop up a whole chicken in 15 minutes (although I can't gut a fish and I refuse to - that's what fillets are for), I make my chicken stock from scratch by boiling and simmering the carcass with onions, garlic cloves, leeks and a carrot. I don't like people in my kitchen, and only I know how to load the dishwasher right. So yes, tell me about peculiar domestic power.

Except that I have this sneaking suspicion all this domesticity, this peculiar power, is sometimes just a facade. A beautifully run house - are all those chores done simply for one's own ego and desire for power or an implicit, unspoken appeal for appreciation and acknowledgement? What, exactly, is the line between a domestic goddess and a tired housewife?

And that, I just realised, is of course the winning concept behind a certain current hit TV series. Sigh, sometimes my ideas do come too late.