Christmas is always a poignant time for your Down and Out columnist. Thanks to the decency of his Estranged Wife, it involves a temporary reinsertion into the family home. On the one hand this is fun: I get to hang out with my children. I get to drink the enormous brandy left out for Santa and sleep on the sofa in front of the fire. And I get to hang out with the Estranged Wife and think: how much we have diverged.
She is certainly not the same person who threw me out of the same house 13 years ago. She’s doing a lot less shouting and crying, that’s for sure. And I’m doing a lot less crying too. Nowadays tears only come when I look at my bank balance. And if there is some friction – as when, for instance, I splash some water from the kettle on to the wooden kitchen surface – I can ask, in a detached, ironical and not at all infuriating way: well, whose bright idea was it to install wooden kitchen surfaces in the first place?
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