To mark International Women's Day, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official newspaper, has graciously commented on women's lib for us. Its editorial decrees that the washing machine has contributed more to the emancipation of western women than the pill, or the legalisation of abortion, or being able to work outside the home. But it would, wouldn't it? Abortion and pills aren't allowed over there. Washing machines are.

What a bizarre world L'Osservatore describes, with its "image of the superwoman, smiling, made-up and radiant among the appliances of her house". It's more than half a century ago, back in 1953, that the automatic washing machine took off and women apparently went mad in the suburbs, turning to drink and sex. Only I didn't notice my mother and her chums being radiant and smiling. They may have got rid of their heavy mangles and twin-tubs, but it was still a fairly bleak life, stuck at home fiddling with these new machines. And it's still a bore today; we're still trying our best to perk up doing the housework (not so long ago, the Daily Mail discovered a new social phenomenon: "Countless British women ... doing housework in the nude ...")

"Put in the powder, close the lid and relax," reads L'Osservatore's headline - but it isn't that simple, Vatican, honestly it isn't. Have you ever tried it? I thought everyone knew that the more time these new appliances saved us, the more tasks we found to fill that time.

But why bother even to hope that the Vatican mouthpiece would see sense? It nabbed its headline from the blurb for Electrolux's Washy Talky®, a bilingual-talking washing-machine launched in India in 2002: an "electronic maid [which] helps with laundry [and] reminds the absent-minded housewife how to use the appliance. If the user accidentally leaves the lid open, she will say: 'Please close the lid ...' Washy Talky doesn't just talk, she also thinks and makes decisions; she assesses the load weight and chooses the optimum programme."

One could always just refer to an owner's manual - except that, according to an Electrolux spokesperson, women often prefer not to have to read manuals. And this is the machine that the Vatican feels has helped us so much with our liberation.

Sometimes I wonder whether progress really is progress. I don't like to wallow in nostalgia, but in 1851, what may have been the first "laundromat" was opened by a gold miner and a carpenter in California. Their 12-shirt machine was powered by 10 donkeys. It sounds like much more fun. But they didn't have the contraceptive pill then, which would have made life even more fun than the washing machine.

• Dr Paul Kelly, headmaster of Monkseaton Community High School on north Tyneside, has suggested that teenagers be allowed to spend two more hours in bed and arrive at school at 11am, because experiments have shown that teenagers between 13 and 19 have bodyclocks that make it frightfully difficult for them to get up in the morning. They're not lazy, just "biologically programmed" to get up late.

What a nuisance scientific research can be. For how is everyone to work round these teenagers' circadian rhythms? Will staff have to work late? And what does Kelly think will happen two hours later than the old getting-up time? By then, the parents will have probably gone off to work. They'll have to leave the house with their children still mouldering in bed, and just hope and pray the lazy little toads get up at all, and if they do, that they remember to turn the gas off, shut the front door and windows properly, and don't just decide: "Sod school, let's have our friends round for an all-day rave or slob-in."

Or does Kelly assume that the teenagers will spring up at the appointed time, and, unsupervised, eat their breakfast nicely, wash up, find and gather together their Oyster card, homework, packed lunch and pocket money, and perkily trot off to school refreshed by their pleasant lie-in and keen to acquire knowledge?

Perhaps I'm just embittered by experience, but I think most teenagers have been a pain in the bottom since their invention decades ago. One can pander till the cows come home, but it won't make a scrap of difference. We've shelled out up to £9,000 a year to keep them going (cost of the average teenage lifestyle, according to the Office for National Statistics) on consoles, mobiles and all the rest of the crapola that is now called "basic essentials"; we've built them shiny new schools (Monkseaton is about to open a new, "most technically advanced" £20m school building), and our children are still the most miserable children in the world.

Last week, walking to the vet at 8.30am, I mingled with a load of them on their way to school, slouching and screeching along the pavement, and I spotted a couple of teenage boys bringing up the rear and puffing away at a giant spliff. Let's hope it turned them mellow rather than psychotic, for the teachers' sake.

At least they were up, functioning and on their way to school. We must be grateful for small mercies. But I'm not. What happened to early nights, consistent sleep schedules, no caffeine, no fiddling on Facebook and no scary films before bed? That might be an easier way to sort out the "teenage zombies" that Kelly is so worried about.

• This week Michele saw Red Riding on Channel 4: "Nasty, gruelling, but riveting, with brilliant acting from everyone. I shouldn't have watched it at bedtime." She also saw Harry Hill in that ghastly collar on the front of the Radio Times, ripped the page off and destroyed it: "I can't take too much horror in one week"