Marriage, perception and memory

Surely I cannot be alone in my uneasy feeling that my lawfully wedded spouse and I inhabit parallel universes. This could explain the commercial success of books like "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Newcastle" or whatever the overhyped tomfoolery was called.

The rift in human perception on which it drew was recently brought to mind by a discussion of 'the incident at Heathrow' some years ago during which a caster became disengaged from the bottom of the oversized piece of luggage upon the bottom of which it had started the day.

My recollection is that it was a poorly made piece of luggage, dangerously overloaded by its female owner and unwisely trusted to the vagaries of airport floors and killer baggage carousels rather than the adoption of the sounder policy of keeping your luggage within the limit you can carry and lifting it clear of the floor. While getting out of the lift between the car park and the concourse, a wheel slipped into the gap between lift and floor and broke off, a fact that cannot be in any way blamed on the helpful, chivalrous gentleman attempting to drag it (and three other bags) at the time.

My wife's recollection is that rather than lift the thing clear of the sill 'like someone with common sense', I first got it jammed out of sheer malevolence and then spent fully 20 minutes pulling fruitlessly at it as queues built up around me, until overwhelmed by a combination of my Herculean strength the extent of which I apparently don't realise and the violence of my language - which allegedly attained a command of demotic Anglo-Saxon so advanced that students of linguistics within 200 metres got out pads and pencils and started feverishly making notes as their eyebrows ascended high into the stratosphere - the poor abused suitcase gave up and shed its wheel into the liftshaft where it subsequently 'must have' caused mechanical failure and congestion on a Biblical scale, too vast ever to have been noticed by anyone.

I suspect I can guess which demographic groups will instinctively believe each version.