At last. A genuine medical condition that explains why I never listen to a word my wife says

AS SOON as I walked through the front door on my r eturn f r om work the other night, my wife launched into a long and interesting account of her trip to our huge local Sainsbury’s to buy the champagne for our second son’s wedding this October.

Well, she hadn’t actually gone there with the champagne in mind. She was just doing the weekly shop. But when she reached the wine section, she noticed that they were offering incredible special deals on Moet et Chandon and Veuve Clicquot. And though the wedding was still six months away, it seemed just too good an opportunity to miss.

This was decent stuff, with labels everyone had heard of. And even after corkage charges, it would work out several hundred pounds cheaper than the obscure house champagne on offer at the wedding venue.

So she filled her basket with all the bottles of Moet on the shelf and asked a passing assistant if he could find three more cases for her (one of the perils of being Roman Catholic, with a son marrying a girl from a Sicilian Catholic family, is that even the most intimate family get-together tends to involve a cast of thousands).

The assistant was less than helpful. Downright unfriendly, in fact. Instead of rushing to oblige this last of the big spenders, he treated her to a lecture on her selfishness. She’d already taken too many bottles, he said. The special offer was meant for all Sainsbury’s customers, not just for her.

Rude

At this point in my wife’s detailed narrative, I have to confess that I found my mind wandering, as it so often does, to the possibility that there might be a column in this. What are the rights and wrongs of bulk-buying special offers?

If supermarkets want to limit them to, say, two bottles per customer, shouldn’t they put up a notice saying so, instead of being bloody rude to anyone who takes more? And if they don’t put up such a notice, aren’t they more or less morally obliged to let us have as many as we want, at the price advertised?

From there, my thoughts drifted to a fantasy of driving around every Sainsbury’s where the special offer was available, buying two bottles of bubbly at each . . . and from there to the extortionate cost of petrol these days, not to mention the congestion charge . . . and from there to my constant worry that we won’t be able to afford the car when I retire in just four-and-a-half years . . .

While I was chewing these matters over, I became dimly aware that my wife, who had been ploughing on with her story in the background, had suddenly gone quiet. This was that most chilling of moments, familiar I suspect to many a husband reading this. I knew what was coming next — and sure enough, it came.

‘You’re not listening, are you?’ she said. ‘You never listen to a single word I say!’

Feverishly, I tried to dredge up to the surface of my brain what little had sunk in over the past ten minutes. Something about how she’d asked if the assistant would be happier if she took a few bottles of the Moet and a few of the Veuve Clicquot. And about how he’d curtly refused to fetch her a box, telling her she could find one for herself at the checkout.

Then there was a bit about how a really nice and helpful assistant had come along — or was he a manager? — and said that of course she could have as many bottles as she wanted. Then something else about the trouble at the checkout, when it turned out that the Veuve Clicquot had been wrongly price-tagged. The £20 special offer, or whatever it was, referred to a half-bottle, not the full 75cl. So it went straight back. Or did it?

Oh, dear, there was no denying it. I was guilty as charged. I hadn’t really been listening and if I had a bottle of champagne for every time my wife has levelled that accusation against me, I’d have enough to supply every wedding in the land for a decade.

Sufferer

So what a huge joy it was to discover this week that my failure to concentrate on anything my darling wife tells me is not my fault. Until now, I’d feared that I was just a bit of a daydreamer, with the attention-span of a goldfish, too shamefully self-absorbed and unself-disciplined to be able to focus on her triumphs and disasters.

But not a bit of it. It now turns out that I’ve been a lifelong sufferer from SCT. That’s Sluggish Cognitive Tempo, if you’re asking — a newly recognised condition, which has been all the rage in America this spring, since it featured prominently in the Journal Of Abnormal Child Psychology.

Oh, what a difference it makes to be able to attribute our little vices and failings to a fancy- sounding medical term. These days, we’re not clumsy, we’re victims of dyspraxia. Our l i ttle darlings aren’t illiterate, they suffer from dyslexia.

Only last month, as I wrote at the time, I discovered that my terror of doctors had nothing to do with my being something of a cowardy-custard. On the contrary, it is a textbook example of iatrophobia . . .

Here, I must break off for a second (blame my SCT) to apologise profusely for misspelling the word three weeks ago in this column ( blame my dyslexia). I rendered it as latrophobia, which was how I read it on the internet (on second thoughts, blame my myopia).

If only I’d thought for a moment about the words we derive from the Greek for a doctor — geriatric, paediatric, psychiatric etc — I would have realised that it began with an ‘i’. Several readers were kind enough to point this out to me — one of them, politely . . .

But where was I? Oh, yes, my delight in being able to add SCT to my everlengthening list of professionally recognised disorders.

As it turns out, this new one is a subdivision of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — a condition to which I’ve always wanted to lay claim, with its magnificent 15 syllables. The only trouble was that, with my inexhaustible capacity for loafing around, sitting still and doing nothing, I could never hope to get away with claiming to be hyperactive.

And now I don’t have to. For the beauty of SCT is that it’s really just ADHD without the H. You can be bone idle, like me, and still have it. In fact, bone-idleness seems to be an essential part of the condition. The clue is in the ‘sluggish’.

Craze

Indeed, if this new craze spreads across the Atlantic, it won’t be long before tens of thousands more British children are added to the staggering 1.7 million — that’s 21 per cent — who were officially classified in 2012 as having Special Educational Needs.

Many of these were said to have dyslexia, others dyspraxia, while almost half had been diagnosed as suffering either from ADHD or the vague, catch-all MLD (that’s Moderate Learning Difficulties).

But I know I’m not alone in wondering: hasn’t the medical profession become far too quick to attach fancy, technical-sounding labels to what may in many cases be simply character defects?

What is certain is that the more merely lazy, disruptive or sleep-deprived children we classify as having SEN, after they’ve been up all night on the internet, the more we distract attention from the minority who really do have serious problems that demand special treatment.

Meanwhile, as an American behavioural psychologist argued so powerfully in the Mail last month — and in his new book, entitled simply ADHD Does Not Exist — doctors are surely doing much more harm than good by prescribing drugs such as Ritalin to children who need nothing more mind-altering than stricter bedtimes.

As for my wife’s tale of woe in Sainsbury’s, I’m delighted to report that it had a happy ending. She came home with lashings of cut-price champagne, which we’re much looking forward to drinking at the wedding.

And if I had one tip to pass on to my boy, about how to preserve marital harmony, it would be this: when the Missus is outlining the fine details of her day, do try to concentrate. And if you can’t, just blame SCT.