I think it’s probably testament to how stressful my life has become recently that one of my pet fantasies had become having to spend a couple of days in hospital. Not, obviously, for anything serious but for something like a minor op, something that would force me to stay in bed, not deal with day-to-day […]
Category: singapore
Thursday
The Thursday before Easter dawned bright and warm. I’d taken the day off and I was hoping to spend the day relaxing and getting the house back into shape. One and a half weeks of the kids being home all day during the school holidays had meant that everything was in a total fucking mess. […]
notes and queries
I hesitated before posting this today, because the vast majority of people who surround me; my family, my friends and the readers of this blog, are amazing and supportive and utterly brilliant and this post doesn’t apply to them. It’s just that, sometimes, just sometimes, over the last couple of years I’ve encountered unsolicited opinions and […]
Attrition
“Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and material. The war will usually be won by the side with greater such resources.” It’s now approaching five months since E communicated with me at […]
Broke
When E and I were students we were broke. We never had any money. Back in those days there were still student grants. I think E had a full grant which, like today’s student loans, was barely enough to survive on. His parents were unable to provide any money on top of his grant, so […]
Tent
When I was at University, one of the first things I studied was The Iliad. I don’t remember all of it (given my social life at the time, frankly I’m amazed I remember any of it), but I do remember being really pissed off with Achilles. Until I read The Iliad, I thought Achilles was […]
Spite and Malice
“Spite and Malice, also known as Cat and Mouse, is a traditional card game for two or more players. It is a form of competitive solitaire with a number of variations that can be played with two or three regular decks of cards.” The film The Wars of The Roses was the first time I thought of divorce as a […]
Missing
Don’t laugh, but has anyone seen E? He seems to have completely disappeared. He’s paid no child maintenance for four out of the last five months, and he’s not answering any of my emails asking what’s happening. My solicitor wrote to him almost a month ago and he hasn’t replied to her. The Child Maintenance […]
Weasel
When asked to describe what his plays were about, Harold Pinter famously replied: ‘the weasel under the cocktail cabinet’. This perfectly describes the sense of unease, even dread, that pervades the seemingly ‘normal’ world of his plays. Like a Pinter play, without the long pauses, on the surface everything in my world is perfectly normal […]
Damage
One thing that I have been more or less constantly aware of for the last two years is the effect that E and I splitting up has had, and will have, on our children. I grew up in the 70s/80s, a time when children of divorced parents were seen as coming from a ‘broken home’ […]
He-total: Life without Ex 