The undrunk tea

It is to Alan Bennet that we look for those fragments of dialogue that so concisely and acutely lay bare the feminine mind. Therefore it came as a surprise when listening to the Archers (This is, for overseas readers , a daily BBC 15 minute radio drama, a sort of rural soap opera without pictures - that recreates the blissful bucolic idyll of the English countryside, cunningly interwoven within the lives of farmers, publicans and their colourful and varied servants and relatives) to see how others have as effectively uncovered the female psyche.

Picture the scene. There is friction in the farmhouse kitchen. The Aga is aglow, the copper pots are burnished and gleaming. The Windsor chairs bright with the patina of ages. Ruth, for years a faithful and loving mother and struggling farmer's wife, turned almost faithless by unexpected yearning in the cow shed for the wayward cowman (now expelled in the peremptory way that soap opera characters can be) and the gulled husband have several weeks after this was exposed to the radio nation, settled into an uneasy and fitful alliance.

Trouble is brewing.

There is a stand off .

Tonight he doesn't want his tea, the fuel for a sturdy yeoman. In high dudgeon he decides he has better things to do , plough meadows, make sausages, prepare a scarecrow, shoot a badger even ... and storms out .

" But ... but I have just boiled the kettle !" she shouts after him.