If you're married with kids, then you have more hope of stumbling across the Holy Grail than you do of finding a quiet life.

This explains why so many men have sheds, allotments, go to the pub, train whippets, spot trains, saw pieces of wood for no particular reason, play poker, seek out the company of pet dogs for long walks and refuse to wear hearing aids even though they clearly need them.

It also probably explains why so many men take up fishing.

Fishing, or "angling" as I believe the purists call it, may seem a mysterious and utterly pointless exercise.

But in some deep-seated primeval way it gets man back in touch with his otherwise redundant hunter-gatherer instincts and affords him some invaluable hours of solitude and sanctuary away from the domestic trials and tribulations of marital strife.

It is said that the worst day of fishing is still better than the best day in work. I don't share such a sentiment, simply because I have never been in to angling.

And neither, it seems, has the fairer sex.

"You're going fishing? What's the point of dangling a piece of string in a polluted river all day to catch a fish and then throw it back?"

That perpetual state of female bewilderment is part of the added attraction of angling.

Take a stroll along the Nene and you will see little gaggles of world-weary men in their middle years dangling their rods (ooh er missus) in the river.

You can almost hear their plaintive cry across the Embankment: "All I want is a quiet life. Is that really too much to ask?"

Well, yes, it is actually. There's the bathroom that needs painting. The leak that needs fixing. The mother-in-law that needs appeasing. The cat that needs ironing. You're not getting off that lightly sonny Jim.

This is why so many men think that divorce is effectively is a sure-fire short-cut to a quiet life. But there is a significant drawback with such an escape route. A divorced man no longer has no reason to retreat to the shed, allotment or local pub. The compulsion to train whippets, spot trains, saw pieces of wood for no particular reason, play poker and seek out the company of pet dogs for long walks is removed.

And so the MADman is cast adrift somewhat and has to radically rethink how to fill his time, which presents a whole new set of problems.

The only constant in his life is the fact that he will continue to refuse to wear a hearing aid even though he needs one.