Lastenhoitajat

Beware of the nanny

What is it with men and their children’s nannies? Last week we heard how Robert Hastings, 31, had dumped his wife Claire, 36, for Amy Hillier, the 19-year-old nanny.

I’m a good mother, Claire Hastings said last week. How could he prefer a 19-year-old bimbo to the mother of his children?

Men don’t usually run off with the nanny because she is the dazzlingly gorgeous, leggy Swede of 1970s sitcom fame, but because she often represents an oasis of enviable calm in the inevitable hurly-burly of family life. She’s not neurotic, she’s not needy, she just smiles and gets on with it in a nonthreatening, noncompetitive, adorably feminine way.

But none of that is as potent an aphrodisiac as watching a nanny being good at her job. She arrives in the morning, smiling and serene, and immediately imposes calm and cheeriness where, 10 minutes earlier, there was only chaos and bad temper.

The children’s mother, meanwhile, is looking massively stressed even though it’s only 8am. She’s muttering about her car keys, about how she’s late, about the ladder in her tights. There’s a blob of marmalade on her jacket, which isn’t helping her mood, and she has already shouted at the children twice. Observing all this, her husband can’t help but notice that mornings are a complete nightmare until lovely nanny arrives.

All men respond to this version of domestic bliss: there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t wish that when he came home his wife would be smiling and fragrant, freshly lipsticked, proffering a cocktail before a delicious homemade supper, after which she would declare herself not remotely too tired for sex – au contraire.