Men only?

I'm talking about organising a record collection, or - in this case - a CD collection. Having spent several hours assembling my new, unfeasibly tall CD rack (to accompany the four chest-high CD racks I already have) I mentally prepared myself for the job ahead . . . arranging them in alphabetical order.

It was at this point that my wife offered to lend a hand. I was grateful, of course, but deep down, I knew full well it would all end in tears.

The decidedly anoroak qualities required to organise CDs is, I fear, a signularly blokey thing.

We were only half an hour into the job when it became apparent (to me, at least) that my wife's method of laying the CDs out on the carpet wasn't working.

"Pretty soon, there'll be nowhere for us to stand," I told her. "Why can't we just stack the As in one tower and the Bs in the next, and so on . . . "

She explained that this would necessitate unstacking the tower everytime we came across a CD that, for example, belonged in the middle of the As.

I said I didn't care. She said that if we were going to do the job at all we should do it properly. I said as long as all the As were together that was good enough because there's no way we'd be able to keep them in strictly alphabetical order anyway. She said something along the lines of "well what's the point of even bothering then?"

It was at this juncture that I noticed KT Tunstall was filed under 'K'.

"What's she doing there?" I asked.

"Where else would you put her?" came the curt reply.

There followed an interesting discussion about where we should stick the diminutive Scots songstress. I wasn't too keen on my wife's suggestion.

We had a similar discussion about the Rolling Stones. Definitely R, I said.

"If they're R, how come KT Tunstall isn't K?" said my wife.

"Because she's not . . . and neither is KD Lang!" I said, slightly too loudly.

"Stuff this . . . do it yourself," she said.