Chaps, we are under attack. It is time to man (and I mean ‘man’) the defences. In yesterday’s Femail magazine, writer Ginny Dougary accused us of space-hogging — of taking up too much room, particularly in railway carriages.

The problem has become so common that the Oxford Dictionary now has an approved term for it: ‘Manspreading’.

Ginny described (with, it has to be said, rather brilliant gusto) how men plonk themselves down on train seats and thrust wide their beefy thighs. She was so fed up with this behaviour that she was declaring war. Her article was illustrated by a photograph of one man sitting beside three women. Whereas the ladies sat with their knees together or petitely crossed, selfish old Captain Groin had his upper legs as wide as a skier’s snowplough.

Spreading out: One young woman places her bags on the two seats next to her

As with many gross slanders, Ginny’s article contained a grain or two of truth. Yet that picture was by no means ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’.

If it had been, it would have shown certain other objects, would it not? It would have shown the women’s clutter.

Where were their numerous handbags? Where were their coats and wheelie-cases and Filofaxes and half-full Costa coffee cups with smears of lipstick on the rim? And where, if you can illustrate such a chirruping nuisance, was their incessant, temple-denting chatter?

Ginny opened her polemic with a vignette from a train on which she recently spent an uncomfortable hour travelling to Sussex. The cause of her discomfort was some insensitive brute who took up more than his fair share of leg room. She went on to recount other horror stories of men taking up more than their fair share of space in a seat and of simply staring into thin air when women tried to make plain their disapproval.

While I would certainly not excuse such male rudeness, let me describe an alternative railway scenario in which the gender roles were reversed. It concerns a journey I made last month, heading west out of London on a hot Saturday afternoon after my teenage daughter and I had been to see a matinee.

The air conditioning in the Great Western carriage was not working. Owing to certain cancellations at Paddington station, the train was disagreeably full.

My daughter and I had to sit apart. I thought myself lucky, at first, to find a single aisle seat. Soon I was reconsidering my fortune and wishing I had been forced to stand in the ‘vestibewel’, as the train announcements call them.

Beside me sat a plump, middle-aged woman with two bulging shopping bags at her feet, plus a suitcase. She told me she was returning home after a two-night stay in London.

'Manspreading': The term used to describe the action of men taking up too much space on a train by spreading their legs. Above, file image

She had further items of luggage in the overhead rack and in the suitcase area at the end of the carriage. Also: a large charm bracelet which rattled, a magazine, a telephone, her ticket, reservation slips and sunglasses.

As the journey began, my neighbour, one of life’s wheezers, awkwardly extracted from her shopping a Marks & Spencer salad. ‘A little something to keep me going,’ as Paddington Bear used to say about his marmalade sandwiches.

Her salad was some sort of rocket and pomegranate affair with a little tub of peppery dressing — sharp and vinegary to the olfactory senses of anyone sitting nearby. Unwrapping this salad was a prolonged, inexpert affair. The film cover tore. Her white, plastic fork proved unwilling at first to leave its own niggly wrapping. Sighs. Tutting.

Raising of eyes heavenwards and a bid to engage me in conversation. This prolonged, agonising operation was made all the more complicated by the other pieces of clutter she was juggling. At one point her charm bracelet dipped into the dressing. She did not notice this.

I was trying to get on with some work on an iPad and therefore resisted her small talk. As an Englishman, I do not much welcome banter from strangers — or even from close family, now I think about it. But at least a third of my concentration was being diverted away from my work, towards my chaotic, needy neighbour.

There was also the fact that I was wearing a white suit and did not particularly want it to be shot by an accidental squirt of salad dressing. Did I mention that her elbows kept jabbing me? I felt like a spring roll under attack from a single chop stick.

Chomp, chomp, chomp. We started eating her salad. I say ‘we’ because it certainly felt as though I was taking part. The woman’s mastication was splashy and thorough — to the point of distraction. Meanwhile, this blousy ruminant’s left knee all the time pressed against my right leg because she had so little room on account of her bits and bobs. She kept saying ‘oppsie’ and ‘sorree!’

There is nothing intrinsically female about the act of eating smelly food on a train. I have seen drunken male bank clerks push Big Macs down their necks on 10pm suburban commuter trains and that is equally disgusting. But this woman was invading my space — all because she had too much luggage.

Whenever we go on a family holiday, my wife and daughters each take roughly four times as much luggage as my son and me. ‘Twas ever thus and will be. Back in May there was a photograph in the Mail of the model Elle Macpherson arriving at Sydney airport with nine large suitcases. Nine!

Every few steps women seem to find another shop to visit, another plastic bag to carry, writes Quentin Letts

When explorer Gertrude Bell set out on a harsh trundle through Arabia in 1913, she took evening dresses, silk undergarments, 12 hats, a fur coat and even a bundle of silver candlesticks.

Today’s women may not quite follow the advice of Victorian writer Lillias Campbell Davidson, who in a guidebook to lady travellers stipulated that an ivory glove stretcher and a tin bath were must-have items on the voyage, but they seldom travel light.

All sort of impedimenta are stuffed into their pockets. Handbags appear to become as capacious as the Tardis. Every few steps they seem to find another shop to visit, another plastic bag to carry.

Impedimenta: it is the female failing, and it takes up a great deal more space on any train than men’s thighs. You may recall that Impedimenta was the name of Chief Vitalstatistix’s wife in the Asterix comic books. She, too, was seldom seen without a high pile of belongings.

Tell me, ladies — do you need 90 per cent of the objects in your handbags? I ask this in all seriousness, without sarcasm. I really am interested to know the answer. Why do you haul so much around with you all the time?

I used to watch Tory MP Amber Rudd (now our marvellous Energy Secretary) when she was a backbench MP. She used to come stomping into the Commons with not one, not two, but something THREE handbags, each the size of a giant and heavy gourd.

Amber used to sit in the same row as the elderly Sir Peter Tapsell MP and in her jolly hockeysticks way she would barge past him to get to her seat. Each time, old Sir Peter was jolly nearly brained by those bags.

These gambol out of their bags and invade the space of nearby men without so much as a by-your-leave, and any bloke who even dared to complain would have his head bitten off with a 'don’t you DARE criticise my handbag'

Women seem to lose all concept of what dangerous (and space-consuming) weapons their handbags are. Fasteners are unzipped with much executive emphasis and the bags’ contents spill forth like lava from a volcano. Nearby seats are colonised, if not by the woman’s designer overcoat, scarf and gloves, then by packets of Kleenex, car keys, a cylinder of Elnett hairspray, and photographs of their children. Phials of Rescue Remedy, library cards, shopping lists, ancient cough sweets, ‘women’s necessaries’, loose change, balls of tumbleweeding grey fluff. These gambol out of their bags and invade the space of nearby men without so much as a by-your-leave, and any bloke who even dared to complain would have his head bitten off with a ‘don’t you DARE criticise my handbag’.

Morning commutes are the worst time: they will brush their hair and scramble in the bottom of their killer bags for elusive lipsticks and hairbands and eyeliners and powder compacts, oblivious to the amount of elbow room they are using. Soon the communal table is in use as a make-up counter.

Then comes the loud telephone call home to make sure that the nanny or the house-husband has done the children’s breakfast. Then she must have a word with little Tarquin himself to make sure that the precious child has eaten all his Coco Pops like a good boy and that he intends to have a successful day at school.

And then, with a loud ‘splack!’ (which makes you jump, for by now you are a bag of nerves), she closes her vanity mirror and barges towards the exit, knocking old folk out of the way like skittles with her assorted items of luggage. And women complain about a few inches of leg room from ‘manspreading’!

Admittedly, some blokes, when availing themselves of a train seat, probably can come over a bit babboonish. I suspect it is a genetical thing, taking us back to the days when we had to establish a nest.

If you win a seat on a rush-hour service out of London’s Waterloo station you are perhaps justified in hitting the seat with a certain territorial triumphalism. Dogs behave much the same way when they first get into their baskets: they will rotate a few times, have a bit of a sniff and establish ownership.

In such a situation a man may also sense a desire to have a bit of a rummage and general rearrangement of his undercarriage. This can be particularly necessary in hot weather when — if we can put it like this — a little separation and ventilation may be required down below.