My newest favourite thing: Flowers

Okay, so flowers aren't a new favourite thing; I've loved them forever. They are beautiful and calming; they fill a room with scent and colour. They are the ultimate in interior decoration, as every real estate agent and magazine photographer knows. And you can chage them depending on your mood - wild and exotic or plain and simple; ordered from a hot house or picked from a hedgerow and displayed in a fancy arrangement or a humble milk bottle.

But I have them in the house so rarely. I don't buy them for myself and him outdoors reckons they're a waste of time - "They just die; I'd rather buy you a beer." Actually, I'd rather you bought me both! Men don't seem to get it - women love flowers. It doesn't mean that you've done something wrong and are apologising, or at least, it wouldn't if you ever presented them. His favourite excuse is, "I won't buy them on Valentine's Day - it's commercial nonsense. I should be able to buy them whenever I want, not because some marketing campaign says I should." Indeed you should, but you don't.

And they do have to be live flowers, so of course they die and maybe that's wrong but I don't need expensive bouquets. A couple of handpicked daisies would do! When I worked as a teenaged check-out chick, my manager gave me a bunch of dried flowers. He was creepy anyway, always offering me lifts home in his car - although he lived 12 miles in the opposite direction - and I have always associated these dead flower things with dodgy men and dust. You just can't get rid of them.

I love doing shows, and one of the reason is that you get flowers on opening night. There's nowhere to put them but they are gorgeous and they burst with good luck wishes into the dressing room and make you feel like a star, if only for a few weeks a year. When you take them home, you transport a little bit of that thespian glamour to your mundane existence and everything really does seem to be coming up roses.

Last weekend we had a party and a friend brought me an orchid tied with a ribbon. It was simply gorgeous. Most people bring bottles of wine or packets of crisps (actually, I think she brought these things too) but few people take flowers round to someone's house anymore and I think that is a shame. Wine and food you expect to share, but flowers are for your hosts' pleasure alone and will last long after they have cleared up the mess, hoovered up the crumbs and wiped up the spills. The excitement and the fun of the party will tangibly linger for a little while more.

Of course I could buy my own. One year my sister told me that her New Year's resolutions were to always have fresh flowers in the house and to write to me once a month. I bleieve she still has fresh flowers in her house, although the second of these resolutions had fallen by the wayside before three months had passed, as New Year's resolutions tend to do. And my mother routinely adds them to the shopping list so the family home is always bursting with carnations and fresias.

Incidentally, I heard that there is a gene that allows you to smell fresias, and some people don't get that heady scent. This must be an urban myth as it seems a particularly useless genetic quality to adapt and inherit. It's not as if it's going to save the species in the long run, is it? Or maybe, those with a genetic predisposition to appreciate flowers in all their rich sensuality are more likely to breed? Now that's a theory in which I could believe. Survival of the fittest and the floral.