This wasn't a problem. I called him to say she'd arrived safely, sat down to have a coffee with her and suddenly, totally unexpectedly, felt ill. We bantered about me being allergic to her, but it soon got serious and within an hour, I was throwing up, fainting and giving my guest no choice but to put me to bed. My husband arrived to find that the wife who had earlier chatted to him so cheerily on the phone was now bed-ridden and comatose.

But the 24-hour bug, or whatever it was that had laid me low so quickly, was nothing to what I endured from my man. He behaved appallingly.

Instead of rushing to my bedside, he interrogated then abandoned me, and in the morning, when I awoke with the headache from hell, he forced me out of bed to cope with his mum and our toddler – something he deemed himself too busy to do.

Believe me, this wound has not healed. It has been a festering canker ever since and when he started with a cold last week, I began serving my revenge very, very cold, with extra ice on the side.

Basically, I've been ignoring him and his howls of anguish haven't moved me one jot. I don't care, I really don't. I'm hardly ever ill (how can I be? I'm a mother and I'm self-employed. I dare not exhale until I'm 65) but when I was, he spectacularly failed to do his Florence Nightingale impression.

I've spent years stroking his brow and chucking Lemsip down his ungrateful throat whenever he's felt slightly snuffly, but when I'm obviously at death's door, he turns into Bill Sykes. Enough is enough. No more Mrs Nice Girl. The sympathy stops here.

It looks like most women feel the same as I do, judging by a new poll by – ironically enough – Lemsip. Looking at the results, I appear to be among the 20 per cent of women who have no pity at all for the sick man in their life.

However, a generous 52 per cent of us give it a whole five minutes from his first moan of "Mummy, my head's a bit hurty…" (I'm usually popping the Champagne cork by then) to the moment when we drop our Carry On Nurse persona and telling him to shut up and put up.

The only thing currently wrong with Mr Me is that he's caught the cold that I had last week and which I survived quite successfully. All I did was treat myself, quietly and systematically, with various kinds of over-the-counter remedies. Sorted, you might think – but no, even with my sensible example before him, he manages to turn our home into Scotland's answer to Scutari.

This is because the man-flu sufferer in my life refuses to believe that he's caught a mere woman's ailment. "You're wrong," he croaked at me as I flounced past, humming a bright ditty. "This isn't what you had last week; this is much, much worse. You only had lady-sniffles; this has similar symptoms, but it's a much stronger germ that only attacks men."

When he didn't get any response, he mewed: "This is why men don't live as long as women. You don't take our illnesses seriously enough!"

Oh, so it's all women's fault, is it? That irritated me, but not as much as the part of the survey in which blokes claim to be our saviours. Seventy per cent of the men questioned said they'd be sympathetic and look after their partner in her hour of need; 64 per cent would do the cooking and 25 per cent would take a whole day off work to attend to their suffering sweetheart.

The survey doesn't make it clear whether this means that they take the day off, spend an hour making soup, then 15 hours on their PlayStation, but frankly, I'm taking many of these figures with a good big pinch of salt. Why? Because although 25 per cent of men say they've taken the day off to look after their woman, only 13 per cent of women say it's happened to them.

So either 25 per cent of loving, caring men are all in relationships with the same, weak, rather sickly 13 per cent of women, or certain gentlemen are lying through their teeth. Sisters, I leave it up to you to decide which it is.