AS I SEE IT, love may make the world go round and all that, but marriage also needs a healthy spoonful of hatred to work. My wife Elizabeth, for instance, hates Vienna sausages and I hate jellied eels.

In fact, in our 14 or so years of togetherness, we've found that our mutual dislikes outstrip our mutual likes by about 23 to 1 - something that prompted one guest at our wedding reception to comment that ours was "not so much a marriage as a state of war waiting to be declared."

Not really, but we long ago decided that our main arena of conflict, should there be any, was the kitchen. That led to our first House Rule, that when one of us is in the kitchen, the other isn't - and if they are unfortunate enough to be there at the same time, both shall keep their traps shut.

That isn't always so easy, particularly since Elizabeth does most of the cooking and I do the washing up. This is a volatile state of affairs that in a nuclear physics lab would rate about 2.6 kilotons' worth of dynamite on a scale of destructive potential.

The thing is, my wife is an excellent cook, but to whip up a dinner of ravioli with garlic bread and tossed salad she requires approximately the number of pots, pans, plates and assorted cutlery it takes for Queen Elizabeth II to throw a state dinner at Windsor Palace.

When it comes to cooking, Elizabeth has an innate hatred of any semblance of order. At the end of it all, stained dishes are stacked atop nine pots, seven bowls, a dozen or so glasses, about 38 knives, 53 forks and spoons to feed New York, all piled into a sink with about a half-inch of water at the bottom.

I hate a mess, particularly one that looks like it's going for a presidential citation in the genre. A pot caked with charcoaled pasta is an abomination that should be banished to Satan's airing cupboard, and grease stains and ketchup blobs are the work of Old Nick himself.

"How, pray tell, am I to prepare dinner without using pots, pans and dishes - wait for the 40-watt kitchen light bulb to cook it?" is Elizabeth's plaint, with the slander and scatological references removed. I hate logic almost as badly as dirty dishes.

The fact that neither of us is up on a charge of capital murder, or at least justifiable homicide, is a tribute to our resolve to ignore - insofar as possible - each other's perceived shortcomings in things kitchenwise and get on with the quite tasty prawn cocktail, apple pie and the like.

No less uneasy are our divergent views of what is edible and what is not. Fitting into the latter category, as far as my wife is concerned, are the 24 cans of Vienna sausages that arrived in the post a couple of days ago, courtesy of a great and dear friend in Texas who noted my observation about English shortfalls in culinary delights.

Elizabeth has made it clear that she wouldn't touch a Vienna sausage with a 10-foot barge pole and she won't sit in the same county, let alone the same room, if I insist upon eating the things. On such occasions, she heads 70 miles down the road to London for two days.

She has a similar aversion to corned beef hash, which she likens to a particularly loathsome form of dog food, and grits, which she says looks - and probably tastes - like the stuff they use to glue bricks together.

I did once suggest that I cook for her my No. 1 specialty meal, which consists of corned beef hash lightly fried in butter and topped by two eggs, sunny side up, a side dish of grits smothered in butter and canned sockeye salmon, and a second side dish of Vienna sausages dipped in French's mustard.

The prospect, I sensed, left her torn between divorce or whether to institute proceedings to have me committed to a home for the gustatorially bewildered. Then she went off to London for two days.

But this food business cuts both ways, you know, and there are items that Elizabeth puts on her plate that would have me commode-hugging if I tried them.

To be fair, she doesn't actually care for jellied eels, but her father did, and like athlete's foot, halitosis and a penchant for drawing to inside straights, that's the sort of thing that surely runs in the genes and is apt to pop up at any time. At a dinner party with Prince Philip, for example.

But there is cauliflower, for which I have the sort of affection normally reserved for golf, head lice and my ex-wife's mother, Edna (actually she was both my first and third mother-in-law, but that is a tale in the Poe genre that is best left untold in polite society).

I don't have the earthliest idea how cauliflower is prepared, or why, but when Elizabeth dumps it on her plate it looks like a brain that fell into the bleach bucket down at the Laundromat.

And, of course, there are the Brussels sprouts, redolent of a cat litter tray that hasn't seen a pooper-scooper in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, you get the point. Elizabeth and I represent a proud union of opposites, each of whom lets the other get away with detesting the things he or she likes because it's so much more fun than forever agreeing.

My wife thinks, for instance, that when it comes to clothes and dressing up and the like, I have taste buds in my feet. She can think what she likes, as long as I don't have to eat the cauliflower.

Thought for the Week: If you're not the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

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