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