WHAT is it with couples these days? No-one with any prominence in the public eye is allowed to have a relationship without one of them spilling the beans in a "kiss and tell" story when they part.

Now Nancy Dell'Olio, ex-girlfriend of England soccer coach Sven Goran Eriksson, is threatening to publish a diary of the last two years of the couple's stormy relationship.

Some people obviously keep diaries as a matter of course, but the idea of writing down every bit of tittle-tattle and insignificant event in their tawdry lives is about as daft as our desire to actually read it. Footballers' wives, politicians' paramours, Big Brother bosom buddies .... apparently anyone who has ever appeared in a newspaper or flitted briefly across our TV screens is deemed to have a riveting tale to tell.

National newspapers may be at fault for creating a market for this kind of seedy rubbish, but we, as readers, are all guilty of making it possible by our incessant interest in what other people do behind closed doors. If TV is anything to go by, we're desperate to know the result of contrived wife-swaps, daily life in airports and even what happens when you put a bunch of egotistical idiots together in a hideous house and film their daily trivia.

If what we see is anything to go by most of the time, why bother revealing any of it?

Nancy and Sven may be the ultimate in glamour (though they strike me as the original pantomime couple) but I really don't care enough about this vacuous duo to want to know which side of the bed he sleeps on and which trowel she uses for her make-up.

And, if my husband is reading this, don't worry, love. I have decided to put the 30 volumes of our life together so far in a vault to be opened sometime in 2020.

That way, the obvious public fuss and bother that might result from reports of our row over the dishwasher, what happened when our daughter got a D in geography and that awful day the cat got diarrhoea will remain well-kept secrets.