You Give Me Fever

You don’t have to be a genius, or a fan of rolling news networks, to notice that the country is in the grip of a deadly virus right now. This epidemic makes people lose weight, feel nauseous and dizzy, take to their beds, lie in misery, shun all contact, feel unlucky and pray for respite.

The illness, known to experts as Divorce, is all consuming with feverish patients watching helplessly as the pounds drop off from their bank balances. These poor souls even have to tolerate jokes like what does a divorcée miss most about dinner parties? The invitation!

January is, according to Relate, the top month for divorce as couples who have decided to give the kids one last Happy Christmas, or who have endured festive weeks gorging on a cocktail of Toblerone, Baileys Irish Cream and their partner’s boring company, make a new year’s resolution to give up on “the vows”. With four hundred and six British marriages per day being terminated, the Divorce epidemic is striking down more people this month than at any time for the past twelve years.

But I think I have detected a theme. I can understand why so many couples were depressed, and thus divorcing, twelve years ago. 1996 was a year of disasters such as the Manchester bombings, Chinese Earthquakes, terrorist atrocities in Docklands, and the launch of The Spice Girls. It can be no coincidence that, a dozen years later, the record rate of marriage breakdown parallels so closely the reunion of Scary, Sporty, Baby, Dozy and Chav.

The celeb world they inhabit is going bananas just now - a kind of bananas split – with more break ups than they can shake their shtick at as the McCartneys, John Cleese, Britney, Marilyn Manson and others rush to say “I don’t any more”. It can only be a matter of weeks till Mattel, makers of the celebrity Barbie, release the Divorce Lawyer outfit for her and the Penniless Hobo kit for Ken.

And divorce seems to make these people say and do silly things. Sister Heather Mills of the Sisters of Perpetual Self Delusion, who has never done any wrong whatsoever in her life, would now seem to be unbalanced (insert your own, prosthetic leg, joke) whilst her oddly coiffed ex comes across as meaner than a bank manager at bonus time. As if that’s not enough, unless the ex Beatle also divorces his hairdresser, he’s soon going to have to put up with the Ginger jokes as well.

Meanwhile, John Cleese has just ended his third marriage, though the titles of his books should have given his missus a clue when they tied the knot. I’m sure she enjoyed his cheery best seller Life and How To Survive It, the snappily titled Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and the hilarious What You Need To Know About Hormone Replacement Therapy, but I can’t believe she didn’t spot a theme, and run a mile, when his Living With Depression was published.

But celebs have always treated divorce as a minor inconvenience. It’s not till it hits a bit closer to your home that it really makes you sit up and take notice.

A friend of mine in the States came home from work on her husband’s fortieth birthday. She left work early as a surprise and, bearing champagne and sexy undies, arrived home to find her husband had shaved his head, added a tattoo, and thrown all her clothes out in to the yard. There had been no warning signs and she was out, replaced by his mid life crisis. Two restraining orders later, she got the divorce and has not spoken to him since.

Another friend, a fitness fanatic, decided divorce was certainly an option when he discovered the guys at the gym were all using the same exercise bike. Problem was he’d married that bike twelve years before.

I have been talking this divorce thing over with my first wife recently - she’s also my current, and only, wife but I’m taking nothing for granted. We have been seeing great friends split up at alarming rates and the only thing we’ve learned is that everyone is miserable, whether it’s the couple, children, relatives or friends.

There’s the awkwardness of wondering which of the couple to stay in touch with. Do you feel sorry for them or give them the courtesy of acting as if nothing’s happened? And how can we stop this misery happening to others? What lessons can we learn?

I thought that there should be a law brought in that you can only marry your partner after a committee of your friends has given them the once over and then taken a legally binding vote. This seemed fine till Debbie told me that if such a law had been in force fifteen years ago, her friends would never have allowed us to marry. Harsh, but fair.

However, no matter what your feelings on divorce, sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say it’s definitely the only thing to do. This week in Poland, a man slipped off to a brothel in Warsaw while his wife of fourteen years was out at work. It was his first ever visit and after checking in he discovered that the madame assigned to him looked a bit familiar. It was his wife.

I wonder if she made him pay?