Who achieves most in the end?

It’s a perfectly pleasant Sunday afternoon (or rather it was when I started this blog post) in June and my husband is sitting up in bed listening to Radio 4 on BBC iPlayer. During the week, he had caught various snatches of ‘Music and the Brain’ with Robert Winston (or at least that’s what I think it’s called) and had been determined to listen to the whole series on Sunday. The Whole Series on Sunday.

So that’s what he’s doing. Just sitting up in bed on a Sunday afternoon for two hours listening to the radio.

Why do men (and I make no apologises for generalising here) find it so easy to do one thing (or even nothing at all) for so long while women feel compelled to use their time “wisely”?

If it were me listening to Robert Winston’s ‘Music and the Brain’, it would be on in the background as I transferred an overgrown perennial to the back of the flower bed, prepared dinner, kept an eye on the washing, tidied out the cutlery drawer, cleaned the front of the kitchen cabinets and ‘listened’ to my daughter on the phone.

Isn’t that the beauty of radio? Unlike TV, it doesn’t take up your full attention? You can “do stuff” as the omnibus edition of The Archers lilts away unobtrusively in the background.

Why then is he just sitting there listening? Listening, I ask you.

Of course, I know why. He feels no guilt in listening. He is enjoying listening. And he is actually listening. Listening and learning.

There will be a quiz night at some point in the future when he will know what four bars of music inspired some obscure author to rise out of his depression and write some slightly less obscure novel that was turned into the year’s biggest cinema box office success. Equally, he’ll know all the lyrics to a song that despite my hearing over 100 times can never remember more than the last line of the chorus. And he’ll be able to follow the plot of a really complicated film – and won’t even get annoyed when I repeatedly ask “what’s happening”.

More to the point, he will eventually return to his own music, do some more work on a song or recording he started earlier and maybe even put some of his newly acquired ‘Music and the Brain’ knowledge to good use.

I, on the other hand, will still have several more perennials to move, dinner will have created another pile of washing up and that blog post I’d promised myself I’d definitely write today will be just another fleeting and distant thought.

Or will it?