The battle over who does the most household chores

That roll call of everything that needs to be achieved at home before the daily grind of work starts a new week.

Tired and tetchy, over a bottle of red on a Friday night, probably isn’t the wisest timing for it, but needs must to keep life ticking over.

For retired couples, every night feels like Friday night, but getting the weekly drudgery and household tasks done still apply.

Some homes have a kitchen blackboard with a list of chores as a constant nudge that the dripping tap, hedge cutting or fridge cleaning won’t do themselves.

Others have the shared, more passive aggressive, spreadsheet, listing jobs timelines and completion dates.

I’m most definitely not that person. I can’t even find my to-do list.

Who does which chore sparks grumbles that simmer and flare about the unfairness and inequity of achievement performance; simmering that bubbles over from one week to the next.

Divorce lawyers can tell a story or 1,000 about blissful-on-paper unions crushed by resentment about inequity of the chore division, sloppiness, evasion or complete non-finishers.

They can wax lyrical about those red mist inducing comments uttered among couples.

“I’ve taken out the bins for you” (seeking a standing ovation because, of course, you are the only person to use the bin); “I’ve done the weekly shop for you,” when they’ve responded to an SOS and picked up one small bag of essentials on the way home, or “I’ve done so much childcare this weekend.” You get my drift.

A typical couple will do on average 63 hours of household work each week but only 29pc of couples share these tasks equally.

Unless you live alone, this is something that effects everyone.

Even if the jobs are shared equally, they’re never completed equally.

As the saying goes, if you want a job done properly, do it yourself, and there’s always one in a couple that ends up doing the lion’s share.

The figures above come from Starling Bank, which has just launched its whizzy new tracker, Share the Load, promising to keep couples focused, fair and communicating when it comes to the unpaid labour in the home.

It shows immediately how household tasks are split. The bank might think it’s on to a winner, but banks are not relationship counsellors.

Very soon its helpful little app, with dropdown menus for house, outdoors, food, lifestyle, family, pets, admin and other tasks will become “your bloody tracker” and be the root of all rows.

Share the Load’s cover shows a happy shiny young couple laughing as they do the washing up together with an infographic showing a target split of 50pc, and the reality on a pie chart of 75/25pc. Yup.

A fair or equal split of household chores simply cannot be achieved - unless couples are clones of each other - because people have different standards and priorities.

The thing about relationships is that there’s always a tussle about who does the most and point scoring.

It’s called reality. Life isn’t fair – just like the labour division in any home.

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You’re lucky if you have a good one. Good ones are like gold dust and hen’s teeth.

Despite being probably the biggest growth sector, good and reliable delivery drivers are hard to find.

In the last week, I’ve chased one down the road from our office for leaving a parcel with a totally different post code and business name, delivered a parcel to a neighbour and heard umpteen accounts of wrong deliveries.

A colleague had two massive boxes of incontinence pads left on her doorstep on Monday for an elderly woman two streets away with a different post code.

They might get a rough deal, working long hours against the clock with tight delivery schedules, dealing with grumpy people who are looking for a row, but they bring us horror stories.

Boxes of glasses thrown over fences, parcels left on doorsteps on busy streets – my son’s running socks for his birthday were stolen after being left outside his flat building in London – and parcels left in rubbish bins.

And service isn’t getting better – in fact another a “miserable” service has been inflicted on consumers for the third year running, according to an annual survey by Citizens Advice.

Evri (34pc of customers had issues) and Yodel (40pc) ranked at the bottom of the league with just two stars out of a possible five, with none securing even a three-star rating.

Royal Mail (which incidentally returned one of my parcels to the sender claiming our office didn’t exist despite it being a subscription delivery delivered multiple times before) and Amazon achieving joint best position with a pathetic 2.75 stars.

In the last month, 13.3 million people – or 34 per cent of consumers – experienced a delivery problem in just the last month.

Citizen’s Advice is urging Ofcom to review its new complaints and accessibility guidance by next April and consider enforcement action on firms if there had been no significant improvements by then.