Scientists are a funny old lot. All those hours spent in the laboratory, squinting into microscopes and fiddling about with Petri-dishes must play havoc with their love-lives: why else would they have come up with a hormone spray designed to make them more affectionate?

I kid you not. It’s all down to something called oxytocin, apparently, and if given to a normally surly testosterone-soaked bloke it will turn him into a sweet and sensitive creature who’s more than happy to turn off Match Of The Day and snuggle up and hold hands during a weepy chick-flick.

According to the Daily Wail, “…The Cambridge and German scientists gave 24 healthy men nasal sprays containing oxytocin while 24 others received a placebo. Afterwards the men were shown heart-wrenching photographs including a little girl in tears, a child embracing a cat and a man in mourning, and asked them to describe the level of empathy they felt with those in the pictures. ‘The oxytocin group showed significantly higher emotional empathy levels than those men who had taken the placebo,’ said Dr Rene Hurlemann, of the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn. In fact, he added, they reached the ‘levels of sensitivity usually found in females’. …”

Urgh!

I don’t want a spray which has Mr Smudd weeping with gratitude every time I let him ferret about in my fleece-lined Liberty Bodice, oh dear me no!

So it’s only a B-minus from me I’m afraid, you scientists; pop off back to your eggy-smelling labs and don’t come out until you’ve discovered something really useful, such as a Flit-gun of chemical to make Mr Smudd grasp that our window frames are totally rotten and need replacing. How about a spray which makes him at last take away the seized cement-mixer that he’s left standing in our garden for over 10 years? Give me a squirt of something to stop him filling the futility-room with chainsaws and oil-filters and handfuls of assorted screws and washers and I might actually let him ferret about in my Liberty Bodice…

Gloria Smudd