WHEN it comes to the household finances, my wife has appointed herself as chief accountant.

She rules with a rod of iron, only occasionally allowing me pocket money.

Believe me, if she’d been in charge of the Exchequer, there’d have been no need for the public sector cuts.

Struggling with the onset of middle- age, I bought a new pair of +2 reading glasses the other day and, with remarkably sharp eyesight, she spotted them from the other side of the room.

“Have you been buying new glasses?”

she asked, rather sternly. I had to admit that I had indeed spent £3.50 because my other cheap pair of specs had fallen apart.

The kids are on similarly tight leash, and mobile phones are a good example. Fortunately, my job comes with a phone and our eldest is financially independent these days.

But my wife painstakingly arranges phone contracts for her and the other three members of the brood – and woe betide any of them if they go over the limit.

So when the bills came recently and she saw that Jack, 19, was way over his normal monthly allowance, she went raving mad. He’d gone from an average of £15 a month to £80 a month and she had steam coming out of her ears for hours.

“What on earth has he been doing?” she ranted at me, as if I might have had something to do with his excessive telephony. “How dare he take liberties?”

Jack, predictably, got the mother of all rollickings when he finally returned my wife’s telephone call that evening. I was working upstairs and my wife was downstairs, but I could still hear the telling-off resonating through the ceiling. He got another lecture, face to face, when we visited him at university a week later.

My wife can be withering when she’s cross and she was, understandably, very cross with the profligate son.

To be fair, Jack was both shocked and repentant. He was “really, really sorry” and couldn’t explain how it had happened because he didn’t think he’d been doing anything out of the ordinary.

My wife told him she was going to have his internet access disconnected from his phone and he readily agreed it was a fair punishment.

“You asked for that,” I told him in a quiet moment when the dust had settled.

“Yeah, I know – it’s fair enough,”

he replied, sheepishly.

A fortnight has passed and I was sitting next to me wife, watching television, at the weekend.

“Oh, I forgot to say,” she said, casually during a commercial break.

“You know that phone bill of Jack’s that was way over the limit?”

“What about it?” I sighed, resigned to the fact that I was going hear her condemn his carelessness all over again.

“Well, it wasn’t his bill.”

“What do you mean? Whose was it?” I asked.

“It was mine,” she said. “I got the accounts mixed up.”

Naturally, it was the phone company’s fault.

The Things They Say

PHIL Storey, of Darlington, was talking to his football-mad 11-year-old son about the thorny subject of match-fixing.

At the start of the football season, Phil had put some money on his predictions, taking Chelsea to win the Premiership and Champions League and Stoke to be relegated.

“Imagine if Joe Hart bet on Man City to lose,” said Phil, “he could just let all the goals in. That wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

George looked off into the distance for a moment and then asked: “Wouldn’t the woman in the betting shop recognise him?”

ANDREA, of Darlington, told me on Twitter how her son, aged four, had run out of school, shouting: “Lauren’s mum is having piglets!”

Nine months later, Lauren’s mum gave birth to triplets.

ALAN Ball, of Darlington, explained that his daughter was beside herself with excitement the night before a family trip to Euro Disney.

“Are we going into the TV or are they going to come out?” she asked.

You can follow me on Twitter @echopeterbarron