This Is My Affair

Because he's worth it ...

Friday, March 31, 2006

For the gullible

This came off the fax at work yesterday, handwritten in the classic boxy print of the comprehensive education system victim:


Hi Laura

Just a quicky to let you know I am NOT pregnant after all.
phew! Just as well cos he was lousy in bed! I wish you hadn't
got me drunk. I wanted his brother, ha ha. maybe I should
accidentally on purpose bump into Nico instead. What do
you think? He looks like a BIG boy. Grrr.

By the way I lost the weight using Reductil from www dot
medbargain.co.uk. They also sell that valium and sleeping
tablet stuff you wanted.

Are you out tomorrow? I just got some SEXY shoes and need
to wear them in!

Call you later

Clare

nb I have edited this to remove the hyperlink which came up automatically when I typed the note verbatim.

Postscript: a high proportion of recent first time visitors are being drawn here by the reference to this mob. Fun and Games. Sadly no one has said they've received the above or similar. Not sure, therefore, why they're looking for this medbargain outfit. Shame really.

Circumstances

under which the British press will shift itself to cover news from down under:

  • Wembley Stadium not being completed on time
  • a royal visit
  • Industrial Relations problems at Wembley Stadium construction site
  • a presidential prime ministerial visit
  • a papal visit (up market press only)
  • welding / scaffolding / concreting / design issues at Wembley
  • a catastrophic bushfire (slow news day only, unless lots of cute but suffering furry
  • animals have been caught on camera)
  • a devastating cyclone (ditt0)
  • bomb threats to Wembley
  • wheat bungs
  • drugs in sport / sex scandals involving Shane Warne
  • kylie (and other crappy pop exports)
  • Wembley Stadium delays
um er that's it.

Except that buried deep within today's Times is coverage of that twat Howard's mad scramble to cut gay marriages off at the pass, as it were.

So you can add homophobia to the list




Forty something

Happy Birthday to me
Happy Birthday to me
I'm forty something (again,
and for a few years to come)

Thank you for the wine, the chocolates, the music and the hugs.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Yet more tedious posturing from Canberra-types

Little Johnny Howard's got his knickers in a twist again.

The ACT territory government (a one man outfit surely?) has decided to institute civil partnerships. With admirable thrift (you'd have thought) the proposal dispenses with a parallel registration system in favour of the utilising the pre-existing registrar/celebrants, though what they'd be providing in the case of a same sex partnership would not be MARRIAGE (as the proposal says over and over again, ad nauseum).

This ain't good enough, oh no.

Johnny and his sidekick Ruddock have put aside their ideological position on States' Rights (more honoured in the breach anyway - see IR) to kick the proposal and its proponent.

It shouln't tax the ingenuity of this pair of specialist saboteurs to render the proposal pointless.

In the meantime a more problematic push has emerged South of the Border. Tragically for second initiative the main driving force behind it is that lamentable soak (convicted drunk driver and all round embarrassment Olexander).

This is a black and white issue. Those who reluctantly drafted and voted through the original decriminalisation legislation knew it, but knew they could no longer sit on their hands; not when internationally respected academics saw drowning themselves in inches of water as preferable to taking yet another beating.

Either its illegal (and no bible-based correspondence will be entered into: I made my position on Leviticus clear when I opened my interest-bearing bank account) or it isn't. If it isn't, and in law it isn't and hasn't been for decades, then we have a responsibility to move legislation to a footing that reflects this. Either gays are inside or outside, but what's really, really unreasonable is to expect them to somehow be either both or neither simultaneously.

What the opponents of change fail generally to spell out is the logical conclusion of their position which is overtly that homosexuality is less acceptable than heterosexuality. Their position carries within it, though they rarely are required to cede this point, the necessity for some degree of circumscribing of the activities, rights and responsibilities of homosexuals. Advocates of advancement allow their opponents to wriggle off the hook again and again by failing to require those opponents to set out how much 'less acceptable' homosexuality is.

Once that point's established we can move on and explore quite how they would prefer to see society deal with the homosexual element within. Should we return to the 1970s when essentially vigilante justice ruled? Should we return to the 1930s when the new 'science' of psycho-surgery was being applied to homosexuals with or without their consent? Should we hang 'em, taking account of the fact that we'd have to re-introduce the death penalty in order to take up that option.

Johnny Howard's position is, as usual to have no meaningful position at all. And he'll probably continue to have no position at all right up to the time having no position becomes untenable. Which is not leadership of any kind at all.

And in the meantime any number of morons, imbeciles and idiots will take the perceived view of of the nation's 'leaders' which is that homosexuals are somehow different and in some deserving of less than full rights and responsibilities and use that as all they excuse they need to kick in a head or three.

So hope and pray one of those heads isn't attached to a friend or relative of yours (or indeed you).

Monday, March 27, 2006

Moral core, or the absence thereof

On the radio (Five Live) at the moment they're discussing the current plague of plagiarism infecting UK schools and colleges.

They've had some ex-student called Sophie on who has blithely admitted to cheating and scamming her way through university. She's borrowed, cobbled, cut and paste her way to the piece of paper that will be her passport to a decent life.

Her justification boils down to the simple reality that without recourse to cheating she'd not have graduated and therefore she 'had to do it'. It doesn't seem to have entered her pretty little head for one moment that she simply wasn't good enough. Not Good Enough. She's now been challenged on that point. In reply Sophie has asserted, and I paraphrase only slightly, that she got it therefore she earned it. ffs!

This is on National Radio!

The second saddest thing about this is that the poor child still actually had to (or thought she had to) work jolly hard to accomplish what she did accomplish. The frightening thing is that in all probability she'll breed and raise offspring in her image.

The saddest thing was the presence of a university lecturer (I've since been to the station's web site to find out his name and polytechnic without success) who said nothing about pulling this young lady's degree.

Now we've another on who actually downloaded her course work, paid someone to sit her exams and waltzed off with a first class degree. And she didn't do anything wrong because as she's put it over and over again in her someone histrionic tones "everyone's doing it".

Round and round we go. I nearly drove myself insane because I could not accept that I was being treated as badly as I seemed to be by someone who continued to insist that he loved me. It took me years to convince myself that I was the healthy one and he the one in need of help. Now, after all that hard work it seems after all that he might well be the normal one after all.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Awkward news from the frontiers of science

For years women have largely been cheering, mostly from the sidelines and generally facetiously and medical science has taken the human race ever closer to the point where it can dispense once and for all with the 'male' of the species.

I should have been paying more attention at the time, because now the details are vague but as I recall it has something to do with either cloning technology or some kind of 'natural' de-masculinisation men (or perhaps both) but the up shot is that men are approaching the moment when they make common cause with the giant panda and make whoopee with the dodo.

Unfortunately, now science, great tease that she is and having led us so far up this fantasy garden path has tripped us up with an ill-placed gnome named gonads.

Media this weekend have gleefully reported a reason for keeping that man rather than washing him right out of your hair. As the Sydney Morning Herald put it (and no, I don't read it I just pinch the headlines): "It’s in the bag, say stem cell scientists"

This is a twist in the stem cell research saga that may not actually make George Bush, Little Johnny Howard (or any of the other grey haired, suited types that run things) feel any more comfortable about this somewhat controversial branch of medical science; in fact I can imagine them crossing their legs in unison as they read the story.

It comes at the same time as researchers push for the lifting of the ban on therapeutic cloning which is currently in force in Australia, and will no doubt be seized on by those who've opposed the science because they can't cope with the cold-blooded mixing of sperm and egg for the purpose of creating something to save an existing life. Mind they can't stand all those sloppy unmarrieds who will persist in making babies on an unplanned basis, too. No, stick to 2.2 and a dog and a cat and a brick veneer on a quarter acre block and don't even think about giving the horses something to take a second look at.

Oh, and don't get seriously ill until they've mastered the art of persuading men to drop 'em in the cause of the greater good.

On the other hand it is intriguing that men have found a rather neat way of rendering themselves indispensable (or at least requiring us to consider that possibility). Resourceful little devils aren't they?

Sage, and other things to add flavour

I've been away a few days now, being more ill than a mother is ever normally allowed to be. Now I'm on multiple medications, including stuff to help me breathe and iron and I ate a meal for the first time in three days, which if it tasted awful wasn't entirely down to the chef and any way he did his best and since he was cooking for the three of us I acquit him of trying to poison me. Its just that he can't cook.

Anyway, another who is further down the path than me and has seen darker places than I have has recently had some wise and interesting things to say (but if you're reading here you've probably already been there).

And I have had time today to ponder hatred and indifference and where I am. About three and a half years ago, when my career was in full throttle, he was in the first throws of this tediously drawn out long-distance love affair that would take him off to his 'better place' and I thought what I could see in the distance was the light at the end of the tunnel (rather than the on-rushing source of the train wreck that is our lives) I was 'indifferent'. Deeply, gleefully so. He could be someone elses problem without me being crippled by guilt that the other person was his mother.

But after all that time, him not going or her not taking him away; which ever the case might be, I'm no longer so sanguine. I'm deeply frustrated and resentful. Here I am still stuck in the mire with this child who refuses to grow up sufficiently to take even the most basic care of himself. My child bearing years have very nearly passed while I wait for him to make up his mind whether to go off on his own or make a go of things with this woman in Philadelphia (or where ever she now lives).

So I tolerate, just, the appalling behaviour, the irresponsibility, the squalor he trails in his wake. And I do this because I seem to be constitutionally incapable of dredging up from within me quite enough, well call it hatred, to turf him out.

He'd go to his mother, who I've heartily disliked at times though I empathise with her in her desperate need to see something other than the unvarnished truth about her only child. Or he'd try to make a go of things on his own.

About eighteen moths ago I was one of any number of unwilling auditory spectators at an almighty marital dispute that went on through a morning and long into the afternoon. From my house I could hear muffled hysteria and breakage, slammed doors and all the other acoustic accompaniments.

She left.

A few weeks ago he died, alone, after making his way through the best part of a dozen cans of lager, on one of the coldest nights of the year. He was a diabetic who refused to acknowledge his condition and eat properly. The verdict of the town's grapevine was that 'K' didn't look after himself.

In the past fortnight the house has gone on the market. The agency carrying the house has put a collection of photographs of the interior up in its window, to the decidedly mixed feelings of those I've spoken with. Words fail me. I simply cannot conceive of any human living in the kind of conditions depicted. And the photographs were taken after the house had largely been cleared of debris.

I know that he's incapable of looking after himself. And I know that's how he'd end up. In some squalid cottage with the ceilings and walls collapsing around him from damp, the carpet mouldering, too poor to pay for heating, too raddled to remember to cook.

My life's quite messed up, yes.

But I've never been an advocate of the death penalty even when it is deployed in its least inhumane forms. This is the problem I've wrestled with for years now. How to come to terms with the choice of condemning him to a protracted death or having him hang around my neck for the rest of mine? Or is there not really any difference?

What I'm struggling with is not an excess of hatred but an excess of responsibility.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Games medal tally

No great suprise that we're way out on top and that's despite the wistful "If only our men could swim" that's crossed my mind quite regularly over these opening days.

You'd have to add together the medals of England (2), India (3), Scotland (4), South Africa (5) and Canada (6) to surpass our total.

And yet, there's a part of me (the bit that has a certain affection for the other passport in my back pocket, which is there due to an accident of birth) that looks at the medal table in a slightly different way:

Gold (23+2=25), Silver (15+10=25), Bronze (18+5=23). Total 73

The remaining participating nations have accumulated:

Gold (26), Silver (25), Bronze (28). Total 79

Hm... not quite good enough.

How to Have an Affair?

Wow, people cruise the internet for Extramarital Excursions 101.

So people are sitting at home, pondering their lives and coming to the conclusion that what will make things better is An Affair.

But how to get started? Obviously a concern for the novice cad or cadette.

The internet is the fount of all knowledge du nos jours.

But quite honestly how likely is it that one would find sensible, pragmatic and level headed (wow, I just wrote three things that mean the same) advice on how to start and manage an affair?

So I wonder. For information on the commencement and conduct of an illicit affair would one be best advised to consult:
  1. one or more web sites
  2. mates down at the pub or over the coffee machine at work
  3. a tome bought at Waterstones (or Barnes and Noble)
  4. a late night radio guru
  5. one's heart (or loins)
  6. other

One thing is certain: don't follow my husband's example. He completely screwed up...

Friday, March 17, 2006

Why am I having such a bad day?

I'm going through another little 'doing my head in my head in' moment.

He's got no money left and we've another 6 days to get through before the next pay packet arrives. That's bad enough but his frustrations with his job are leading him ever closer to flying off the handle in a way that will see him being summarily dismissed.

That will leave us up THAT creek without a paddle.

To make it more complicated I suspect co-management of conspiring or at least taking advantage of his known fragility. Whether or not he ever did suffer a nervous breakdown, whether he made it all up and whether or not he was inadvertently actually telling the truth one individual just might actually be working on his vulnerability.

There's little point telling him to take a deep breath and find another job because (a) he never takes advice and (b) he doesn't want a job. What he wants is to win the lottery. A few million to tide him over until his mother dies. As long as she dies reasonably quickly he'd probably have enough left over to pay the inheritance tax bill and move into the awful house she lives in up in London (6 bedrooms over three floors, one bathroom without separate toilet, and a kitchen that measures about 10' x 5').

God help us if we ever do win the lottery. He'll want this, and he'll want that, and he'll want the other; and pretty soon we'll be a million times more miserable than we already are. At least being poor our miseries are manageably small.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Duck Stumps Brains Trust

The duck that briefly took centre stage at the Games opening cerermony (name: Ping) has stumped the Brains Trust that 'runs' Britain's Daily Mail. I'm amazed it took that much...

On the subject of Ducks: Steve Harmison has withdrawn from the England team to play India in the third test match, so it is now a case of 'would the English cricketer leaving the tour please check under the beds to make sure that no-one has left behind our cunning plan to retain the Ashes in Australia come the southern summer'.

A contemplation and another digression

Where are all the bad boys and naughty girls?

Well obviously they're between the poly-cotton sheets of a run-down Travelodge on Motorway X, Y or Z, just outside some anonymous mid-sized town in the midlands; too busy conniving, conspiring and consummating to chronicle their affair let alone delve deeper and explore their respective motivations.

The internet is awash with professional and amateur porn and pornographic (rather than erotic) blogs are merely the most recent manifestation of this well established phenomenon. According to one source recent figures suggest that porn is no longer the dominant source of material on the net (or the web, whatever). Crap! All that has happened is that the porn has gone corporate. And the survey purveyors have defined corporate porn as corporate rather than porn. Lies, damned lies and statistics; and I should know. I'm an economist.

Anyway in all the sordidness out there it is all too easy to find the adventures of this rampant priapic husband or that nymphomaniac bride. A couple of women have made their fortunes out of a chronicle of their lives as high-class hookers. Unlike the former crap the latter crap is usually well written as befits someone who all too probably is the product of a middle class upbringing and a good school.

The ordinary Joe (or his female equivalent) indulges in kinky sex, his'n'hers tattoos and feeds off the thrill to an extent that so leaps off the screen as to make the kinky sex and sessions at the tattoo parlour read like fantasy.

Hmm. I'm looking for something credible - ordinary people in an ordinarily sordid extramarital adventure; preferably a husband and an unmarried mistress. Where are you? Oh, yeah ... between those poly-cotton sheets at a run-down Travelodge etc, etc.

I'm fed up having spent much of the past two days searching for enlightenment in the usual places. But in the process I stumbled across the difficulties the futurist Richard Neville has run into with a mocked-up spoof of Little Johnnie Howard's web site carrying an 'apology'. In recent days he's put up a piece of satire to the site (which happens to be hosted by Yahoo, notorious shoppers of Chinese dissidents to China's repressive state apparatus), only to have it mysteriously shut down.

Somehow in all of this the idea pops into my head that if we go too far down this path we'll be proving that Harold Holt really was spirited away from Cheviot Beach in a Chinese Sub.

All's not lost; here's a link to Richard Neville's site where you can still access the piece that has caused the problems.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

A digression

Six years ago, before the shit hit the fan, when his absences were genuinely work related, I had the chance to sit down and watch the early morning sport from Sydney during the 2000 Olympics and I would cry with pride despite being a Melbournian through and through.

Now, half an hour ago I stood and watched the start of the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games which Melbourne is staging and the tears that sprang were not tears of pride but rather sadness. I should be there, though not necessarily at the games.

This meet is regarded with a mixture of disdain and apathy among potential spectators, potential corporate sponsors, the sporting community outside the commonwealth (and possibly to some extent within). A significant proportion of BBC coverage has focused on this aspect in the lead up.

The flying W-Class is probably best glossed over. Followed not long after the bizarre spectacle of Johnnie Howard making the Her Maj's youngest look really very tall and almost manly, which must be the oddest thing Wee Johnnie's ever done.

The two uber-world class athletes who might have been there, Thorpe and Radcliffe, have had to withdraw. I have no idea what the withdrawal of the latter has done for the field who'd otherwise have been trailing in her wake in the Women's Marathon or whatever event she was competing in at these games, but the absence of Ian Thorpe from the swimming pool has surely thrown open the swimming meet across the board. With Hackett out as well through a shoulder injury the possibility that we'll have the 1500m title prized from our grip and/or that we don't come out as top nation in men's swimming is all too real. Thank goodness the woman's team is so so strong.

See I really am Australian. I just can't help myself. Just when I've got myself all fired up to be apathetic, the little snippets of sporting trivia that my brain soaks up without my permission and coalesces into some semblance of an informed opinion seep back out again thus transformed.

UPDATE:

The ceremony has now moved on. The baton has been passed through a succession of AFL team captains; entertaining sideline was BBC presenters struggling to sound knowledgeable, by and large succeeding admirably, then falling flat on their faces: GEE-long not GHEE-long. And we Melbourne Football Club supporters knew all along Ron Barassi walks on water, too.

The pyrotechnics actually didn't just look like a desperate attempt to match the spectacular Sydney can throw without putting in much effort thanks to a spectacular natural harbour and the coat hanger strung out across it. At least we could see where a sizeable chunk of the $90 million was spent.

Oh, and I WANT ONE OF THOSE DRESSES - the blue ones with the delightly 50s bodice and full skirt in various shades of blue. Lovely.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Sticking to my New Year's Resolution

I seem to recall giving an undertaking that I would be less opaque and less oblique this year and I've only inadvertantly been as good as my word.

Oops.

The banal truth is that the only affair I'm involved in is the one where I'm the 'betrayed' wife, my husband is 'the cheat' and she is the fool. More fool me, I guess.

So that's that. If you want intimate details of a sordid little bit on the side by cheater, or the cheatee (?) fuck off elsewhere. God knows there are plenty of whoppers and wet ones out there in cyberspace for your delectation.

We were married back in 1993 full of the sort of high expectations most people carry into marriage, even those of us who are closer to thirty than twenty and who have one or more failed marriage behind them [he'd been married before, and although he didn't tell me afterwards hadn't actually got himself properly divorced before he started dating me, though he described himself as divorced].

It took perhaps a year for the scales to fall from my eyes, which by curious coincidence is about exactly the same length of time it took for his first wife to decide she'd had enough and go home to her parents. Had I been in my home country, let alone my home town I would have walked. But I was on the other side of the world, my mother had made plain she disapproved of him, I had too much pride to go home broke and with my tail between my legs. And crucially I didn't see then how bad the thing I'd got myself into actually was.

I was a disaffected wife, disappointed with what went on in the bedroom, disgusted with what went on elsewhere: in the kitchen, bathroom, and lounge-room which were the other three rooms in the single bedroom flat which was our first home.

It was not until a couple of moves down the line that I could see clearly how feckless he was and is at heart; the extent to which he was taking advantage of my near compulsive need to 'do the right thing' (like pay the rent and utilities on time, eat well, keep the house tidy, engage in a healthy social life). Had I been naive in agreeing that bills be in my name? Of course. Would I make the same mistake again. Fat chance: my credit rating is shot to shit and I'd be lucky to get a contract in my name ever again.

So I kept my head down, saved what I could and prayed that one day a little light representing the 'end of the tunnel' would appear to guide me 'home'.

Right about the time I thought I could see it I found out I was pregnant. I'd been told when I was 20 that I'd not conceive without assistance (IVF) so this, given we'd had sex about twice in the previous twelve months, came as a total shock. Being already more than five months pregnant (no obvious symptoms, yes some health problems; see above) I hadn't time to sort things and get out, fly home and be a single mother.

Besides, if I'm honest, I thought this might be the wake up call he'd always needed. Hmmm, can I be stupid.

First reaction: "there goes our life style". Promise? Ha Ha!

Second reaction: "of course if its a boy it will be called x (for his father) and if its a girl it will be called y (for his mother).

Quite what was going on in his mind when he uttered this second reaction is something I've gone over and over and over again.

For almost everything else he ever did I can just about acquit him of malice. Almost everything else pretty much looks like stupidity or feckless or something similar.

But not this. Because about three years later, when we were finally confronting his infidelity, he told me that he hadn't believed until not long before that he was the father of our daughter. Suspicion over the parentage of the child was not going to get in the way of him inflicting, without any consultation AT ALL, one of other of his ghastly parents' ghastly names.

I had limited paid maternity leave entitlement so I sought assurances from him that our savings (including shares (stocks)) were intact, just in case we needed them if things got difficult, were I to extend my leave for a few weeks unpaid. He looked me straight in the eye and promised that they [the share certificates] were in the house.

During the months I had off I cleaned and reorganised and in the course, naturally, I found the sales receipts. He'd sold them, all of them, sometime almost immediately after they'd been obtained.

The downside of this discovery was far outweighed by the upside. Finally I had incontrovertible evidence that It Was Him, Not Me.

I'd been wondering if I was actually losing my mind: how could someone insist and say often that he loved me, and do things that he appeared to do and treat me as he appeared to treat me. So I must be seeing a distorted picture of his behaviour or my own understanding of what constitutes normal behaviour within a marriage must be somehow wrong [after all, my father was dying of cancer from when I was six, and his fight for health dominated our lives for the next four years, after which my mother didn't re-marry; so did I really have a real idea of marriage?]

This was therefore a watershed moment because afterwards, paradoxically, I believed in myself once again. I had the courage and strength to apply for a transfer from the support side of the business to the fee-earning side, where the respect and the money are. I'm bright and hard working and the promotions came and after a time I worked myself (us) out of debt and onto a stable financial footing. I kept him on because he was cheaper than a full-time nanny (although less use in that role, and God forbid he should do a shred of housework).

Was this demeaning? Was I undermining him as the man in the marriage by going out to work at six in the morning, flying about the country to client meetings, working until the early hours of the morning to deliver client assignments on time and of the highest quality?

If you're suddenly thinking that, read back from the start; I got back to being career orientated and 'used' him as home help after he'd had years of chances to go out get a job, keep it and make a contribution to the family income - when I (we) had a child to keep in food, clothes, warmth and so on, and no other obvious choice except welfare.

By the way, not only did he not do a shred of housework, but his child minding duties were limited to getting his daughter out of bed, breakfasted, washed, dressed and to the woman I paid to care for her on time. For the four years this lovely woman cared for my daughter her complaints about the state in which our daughter would arrive and the lack of punctuality were a constant. Somewhere in the past I posted about the financial strain of this in the early days before the promotions came. The point is he did fuck all, absolutely FUCK all.

Then came September 11, 2001; he decided to get in touch, using the website Friends Reunited, with a woman he'd been at university with.

They began an email correspondence which led to an invitation to him to join her for a visit in the US.

By this time he'd got himself a job as a 'weed-sprayer' with a local weed spraying company (of the sort that gets contracts from railway companies to spray their lines and verges, etc). The job had taken him away on field trips a couple of times so the first couple of times a trip away was no problem.

In fact it was some time before I untangled the chronology of all of this. In the August of 2002 I had to take two weeks leave to cover for my child minder being away. During that time, and he was away with her I decided to clean the house thoroughly and paint the master bedroom. I discovered that the panel in that room behind which the boiler is concealed had been loosened. From behind it I extracted a supermarket plastic carrier bag and in it I found some emails, some boarding passes, some restaurant tickets and other detritus.

Somewhere else among the squalor I found her business card and other bits of stuff (like american sweet wrappers, Philadelphia newspapers and other bits and pieces). I moved the bed around to clean properly. Underneath it I found a couple of girlie magazines dedicated to very young woman. Not children, but young woman only just emerging from childhood. Somewhere else I found a couple of videos. What was almost amusing was the women in the videos, just judging by the pictures on the cases were raddled old hags. I knew he was catholic but this a new dimension of his catholicism.

I also found the bills he'd not been paying. It was this long fortnight I sat down and negotiated the settlement program that enabled me to pay our way out of trouble.

In the years since I confronted him about the affair I've had an undertaking from him he had no intention ever of keeping that he'd be discrete, lived with the knowledge that his friends and colleagues and plenty of other people in the small town where we live all know and have to some extent or other conspired in the affair.

So much time has passed we've both got stuck in this new and bizarre rut. Lack of money means he no longer gets to visit the US once a month as he once did.

Among the emails was news that she was embarking on IVF treatment, having never had a child whether within her own failed marriage or outside it. It was not absolutely clear that he was the donor, in fact it read as if she'd started this before he got in touch with her, but there were also exchanges that suggested they were trying 'the old fashioned way' when they could be together.

Then later there were clipped articles on inter-country adoption, so I guess she never did succeed with IVF. If she's adopted she's presumably receiving fewer airmiles, which she was using to fly him about.

I was able to look her up in the Philly phone directory and find an address that tallied with a scribbled note I once found, but the listing is no longer there. Either she's moved from Philadelphia or had her listing removed. Does she think I'd stalk her? Christ I'm not that interested.

The only things I want to know from her are
  1. why won't she take him off my hands completely rather than keep us in this dreadful limbo and
  2. if she's tried option 1 and not succeed why has she not asked herself what the fuck he thinks he's doing and
  3. if she's figured out he's a complete shit, why is she still phoning him up here in the UK at work?
I did stick her name in a search engine after I found the business card and was astonished by what it produced. Not only is this woman a senior Vice President in a US owned multi-national company that is a leader in its sector, but she's clearly a major player at a national level within her own area of professional practice. Up till then I'd been assuming the other woman to be some sad and desperate figure. The two don't fit together.

The affair did appear to taper off (much less time away). I thought perhaps she'd got wise or got bored or got lucky with someone better [and I hope that one day she does]. I did just very occasionally wonder if it was still rumbling along: had she moved to the UK or Europe to be closer to him since he couldn't move to be with her?

I guess I'd convinced myself that our only problems were the ones we'd always had, the ones that were part of the 'marriage' before our own 9/11, the deceit and indolence and so on. And apart from the shock of hearing her, actually hearing her calmly, casually announce herself and ask for him, that's why the phone call was so upsetting.

These two people. What is going on in their minds? What does she think she's doing? He's not got some hugely responsible and demanding job with some big company making it difficult for him to be with her (contrary to what he's told her in the past) and I'm no obstacle to them being together either.

In one of her early emails to him she expressed sympathy that he found himself in a marriage 'that made him miserable' [in fact, I've probably misquoted, but it is something like that - one day I'll transcribe the emails for your entertainment].

Perhaps he's told her that I've made things so miserable and difficult for him that he's had to leave that job with so much responsibility (and presumably a commensurate pay level). She knows where he works - she's phone him there and presumably more than once. Well he's a shelf stacker and occasional check-out operator, dear. That's about the most responsible job he's ever held down and he has absolutely no prospects whatsoever of promotion. He has been promoted to his own particular level of incompetence, and remains there because the paucity of talent in this town is such that the local supermarket could not get someone better on the money it is able to offer.


Well I don't know about you, having waded through all that, but I feel a hell of a lot better.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Are you the other woman .. can you help?

I am genuinely mystified and so far no one I've consulted (or cyber-consulted for that matter) has given me a fucking clue ...

why would a woman of above average intelligence and achievement (both academically and professionally) find my feckless husband alluring even as an occasional stud?

She isn't slumming it ... after all this guy is public (in the UK sense) educated and occasionally attended university. He's no plaid-shirted building site type 'bit of rough'.

On the other hand he's no high flyer ... he's just Joe Ordinary run to seed and with a wife he can not or will not leave.

Why would a woman conduct a long term (four and half years and counting) affair that has cost her considerable sums (he isn't earning enough to buy transatlantic flights once a month for himself or stay at a Marriott for a week at a time) and given her surely fuck-all in return in most senses.

If you have experience of being the other woman, would you please enlighten me? I'm only too happy to answer any questions you might have in the mean time, if that will help.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

We've more or less settled back into our routine after Tuesday's call ... after a couple of subsequent grovelling "I'm really sorry" apologies we have squalor and irresponsibility as far as the eye can see and this has provided me with the breathing space necessary to consider where the call, evidence that the affair has nowhere near fizzled out, leaves all of us, including her.

That this woman is still trailing around after him after all this time beggars belief and is the one truly mystifying aspect of this sordid little affair...

How can a presumably mature, once-divorced career woman regard my overweight, balding, chain smoking, heavy drinking, hairy, feckless, aimless, charmless and impoverished husband as catch?

Your answers on a postcard, ladies and gentlemen, to the usual address.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Ladies and Gentlemen ... the Affair is NOT over

For the benefit of those who are just tuning in, as well as for those who haven't yet worked out what the fuck is going on, a few facts to serve as background:

  • my husband of 13 years is in his mid-forties, overweight, underexercised, greying and balding
  • he is in the habit, when at home, of fixating on television, drinking, smoking, eating, and doing the minimum of work necessary to retain his jobs
  • the affair I am involved in is the one my husband is conducting with an equally middle-aged amerian woman
  • his lover is about the same age as us, divorced with no children, with two degrees and a successful career within a specialised field employed by an American-owned multi-national corporation
  • she lives or until recently lived in Philadelphia
  • my husband and this woman dated when they were at university here in England then lost touch immediately she returned home
  • my husband contacted her in the aftermath of September 11, when our marriage had already ground to a halt in almost every sense; within a month she'd invited him to visit her in the States
  • for a significant period of time my husband disguised the visits he made to the US as job related training exercises
  • when I found incriminating evidence of the affair he admitted it and then continued it on the understanding that it would never, ever impact on life at home (in other words that he'd be discrete and stop stealing money from me and my daughter to fund his jaunts)
  • after the first couple of years the visits to the US seemed to become less frequent and over the past year or thereabouts I've come to suspect that my husband and his Senior Vice President (who is currently the chairperson of some national practitioner group in her field) have called it quits

The affair might or might not have run out of steam but my husband remains a shit in almost ever way imaginable.

He is enormously intelligent, yet despite that he's failed at everything he's attempted for reasons I've given up trying to understand, but are possibly connected to an untreated nervous breakdown he experienced maybe even as far back as his late teens or early twenties.

He thieves generally rather than specifically in connection with this affair including theft involving the forging of my signature to empty the savings account in our daughter's name, he's a slob of the highest order (of a calibre beyond description), he's deceitful as a matter of routine and thoroughly unreliable, yet he has the remarkable knack of convincing people in the short term that he is honest, upright and hard working.

My husband, this woman VP's lover, is a bread shelf stacker at the local supermarket where I'm manager. That's the depths to which the is product of up-market North London prep school and minor English home counties Public School, university law degree etc, etc has sunk. And he's happy.

In recent rambling postings here I've laid out my suspicion that the affair has run its course, perhaps that she's seen sense.

And this morning I answered an incessantly ringing telephone in the warehouse admin office and it was Beth, from Philadelphia (or where ever she's now living, she's removed herself from the telephone directory since he had to tell her that I 'knew') asking for him.

It was an instructive experience ... I kept my cool, my voice neutral, I put her on hold and put out a call for him, and only then I started to shake and thought for one horrible moment I was going to cry. What the fuck is that. I'm over him, so over him and the humiliations he's piled on me.

What the fuck am I doing here allowing anyone to treat me in this way? Come July/August I have to submit an application for a renewal of my visa to live in this cold, grey, miserable and rat infested country. Once I have that and I'm at liberty to make decisions based on what's best for me and my daughter I will. Until then this is what I have to put up with... taking calls from this stupid, stupid bitch in Philadelphia...

So how long is that ... let's see March, April, May, June, July, August ... about 4/5 months till I put in the application.

I can do it