And time to cook an evening meal when your beloved comes home from the office

And time to cook an evening meal when your beloved comes home from the office. No need to rush to late night shopping to buy a birthday present. No more traipsing round Sainsbury's on a hellish Saturday morning. "A non-working partner can take care of all the time-consuming drudgery: the housekeeping, shopping and bill-paying. She gave up her City career last year to follow her husband's posting to Eastern Europe, and is expecting her first child: "You exercise more, and even though I am pregnant I feel fitter and healthier than I ever did in London. They even eat better food - "I don't have to buy aged mushrooms from the corner shop, I can buy fresh every day," Laura, 30, says.

Certainly all the Nineties housewives I spoke to for this piece said repeatedly that they feel healthier, fitter and mentally happier than they ever did when they were stuck in an office for eight (or more like 12) hours a day. I decided that there had to be better ways to spend a Saturday night.And yet, sometimes I look back and wonder what my life would have been like if I'd stayed with the banker. One of the bankers vomited onto the carpet in the hotel bar during a pounds 50-a round drinking game. The low point came on a corporate weekend at one of the country's most expensive hotels. I had cheap clothes, no make-up and (worst sin of all for all the American clients I was supposed to schmooze) very short hair.

There were swanky restaurants, taxis everywhere, catered parties in antiques-laden Chelsea townhouses.I was useless at it all. Less the bonus, of course.)For several years I lived the life of the corporate girlfriend: evenings making small talk to his colleagues, weekends spent socialising at hotels chosen for their golf courses. (To give you some idea of his salary, I now earn the same amount as he did seven years ago when he was starting out. My boyfriend at university gave up on an academic career and reinvented himself as one of the "rocket scientists" who power American banks. But why do we hate it ? Are we jealous because they have snagged rich men? Or is it legitimate anger at women who have betrayed the hard-won gains we've achieved in the workplace in the last 50 years?Ironically, I could have been one of these women. Many of us resent the kind of woman who can spend her day doing up the house or return to college to do a course that's always interested her while the rest of us toil on as wage slaves.

Indeed, I am meeting them in increasing numbers.Admit it: you're annoyed. But the young, married, childless woman who doesn't work does exist. By 1996, three in four married women of this age are employed and we can assume most of the rest don't work because they're looking after their children. In 1975 only half of married women aged 25-34 had any paid income. Twenty five years ago, they would have been considered commonplace. She's member of a new breed: the Born-Again Housewives. These women used to have great jobs, but they've packed in the high-powered career and are supported by their wealthy husbands. The reason for your harried existence and her glossy magazine lifestyle is about 40 hours a week For this woman doesn't go to work.

She puts your shambolic life to shame by getting up early to go to the gym, taking French lessons, reading hardback books, and devoting herself to her husband, family and friends Frankly, she makes you feel pretty useless. Maybe you have a friend who has time for everything. In her tripped out, soul-searching post-teen way, Milla has just said something both funny and fundamental, and you realise that, yes, freedom probably is a prison, and yes, an interview about her acting career and relationship with Luc Besson probably is missing the whole point of Milla Natasha Jovovich.A longer version of this article appears in the June issue of `Dazed & Confused'.. my father was a spaceman."A hush settles as her lateral space cruise comes to its conclusion Los Angeles pauses. I watched Jodie Foster and she's seeing the stars and the beauty, and suddenly it became so sweet and I couldn't believe it, that ...