Next up: 'It's Complicated'. But this time with a friend who is in the process of separating his wife of 28 years. What a pair we are - the leaving and the left.
'Oh that stung,' He said later of the scene where Meryl Street is sitting around the table with her children and the ex-husband arrives looking forlorn to be left out of their happy little group. 'That's going to be me.'
'If you think that's bad, just don't go see Up in the Air,' I cautioned, though I started choking up in the scene where the youngest daughter goes off to college and leaves Meryl (who in the film looks like an unmade bed according to Sharon, at-least-she-didn't-make-her-living-out-of-forgetting-her-underpants, Stone) alone in the kitchen of her beautiful family home. Let's forget that Alex Baldwin looks like he should be starring in Family Guy but God forbid that Meryl Streep doesn't brush her hair.
I'm unashamedly sentimental about chicks flying the nest though I've signed up all my my remaining cuckoos for flying lessons and sent them a list of regional airports to which they might soon flit off. Two down, two to go. However, I still cry over the eldest every time she goes back to Oxford and I can summon tears at will by merely thinking about the youngest, but that's because she's usually just told me to f... of myself, though her verb doesn't even rhyme with fly.
'At least you'll always have your children around you, I can't say the same about mine,' says my friend as he links my arm and we repair to the local pizza restaurant which is, as you might expect on a Saturday evening, heaving with the sort of young, squirming, families than neither of us have any more. Thank god.
'Well, I won't have them, but I expect they'll still visit me. Not that having them is all that it's cracked up to be. You know, it's not all group hugs, pyjama parties and big cosy family dinners - it's hair choking the drains that nobody can be bothered to pick out, and disappearing knickers from the dryer that you hope, just hope, have ended up in the girls' underwear drawers and not on the loins of the son with the long curly hair.'
He looks unconvinced. And he's right to be. Yes, I can moan as though being paid by the word for it (which I kinda am), but I would still rather be filling my fridge with food I won't get a chance to eat, and appalling the visiting new man with the line of trainers that fills the hallway making it look like he's dating the Nike sponsored version of The Sound of Music, than living alone with my cat.
Not knocking cats, so don't bother writing to tell me how intelligent they are - it's just that having got rid of one lot of indifferent creatures who cast hair and look at me disdainfully when I attempt affection, I am not keen to replace them with another identical creature who also can't flush the loo. Nor do I want to turn into one of those people who talks about their dog as though it had opposable thumbs and a complex inner life, such as the man I met recently who said that 'he and Hector' wanted to take me to dinner. Lest you think that I was contemplating a threesome - Hector is a dachshund. I think Hector might have been the better company, admittedly, as his owner, erm, I mean best friend appeared to be a conspiracy theorist who thought he was doing me a favour by considering me as a possible date given that I was eight years older than him. He also had a lisp, something of a disadvantage for an Italian.
I mean, who is the one who has dinner dates with his dog? Not me. I just didn't fancy it. Or him.
But I digress.
My friend is still looking glum, however as we start saying how it would be the best solution all round if we could only cast a magic wand over our marriages and turn back the clock to pre-broken days (and I say that even though my ex also looks like Alex Baldwin but with less hair) I'm the one who starts weeping just as the burger arrives. He hands me a tissue. I wave it away. I have my own stash.
'But just think of all the freedom we'll have,' I sniff, eagerly trying to put a positive spin on what just seems horribly lonely. 'I mean, new man, or at least future new man will stop freaking out that he's in bed with Florence Henderson every time it creaks when sex turns into a game of statues - though I think, somehow, that current new man will not be around long enough to reap the benefits.'
'Why not?'
'Well look on the second date he brought designer chocolates. On the third he brought flowers. On the fourth, it was my birthday and he brought expensive champagne and presents. On the fifth it was Christmas and he brought more presents. On the sixth he brought wine and fancy cheese. On the seventh he brought more wine. On the eighth he brought his tool box...'
'That's amazing - his tool box? I want to date him.'
'I know, how sweet is that - he said he was going to do all my odd jobs.'
'I don't do odd jobs. I don't do presents either. So what's wrong with that? He sounds lovely.'
'He didn't. Do the odd jobs, I mean but frankly, I was sooooo gushy at the whole knight in white overalls thing he didn't need to even show me a spanner. He had to rush off after breakfast. However, that was the end of the presents. Last few times he didn't bring anything. Not even the tool box. And the other night, he arrived drunk...'
'Ah.'
'Yeah, ah.'
'Will you stop wiping your eyes - people will think we're having an argument.'
'No, they'll think you're dumping me.'
He stands up and smiles and gives me an enormous hug, a kiss on the cheek and tells me in a very loud voice how lovely I am looking. 'I'll be damned if I look as though I'm leaving anyone else ever, ever again,' He hisses. 'I'm fed up being the bad guy. Have a drink.'
But somehow a diet coke just doesn't have that celebratory, to-hell-with-it-all, ring to it.
I ate carbohydrates instead and went home to plumbing hell where not one, but two bathrooms are out of action due to the fact that nobody scoops anything out of the plug hole. The central heating is blazing at the temperature of a Caribbean summer because the hot water only works when the thermostat is set to 28 degrees. All the lights are on. I tidy up the assorted dirty dishes, close the door of the microwave and wipe up the exploded food from its perimeter. I scrub the table, fold the laundry, throw away out of date food and decide to have a bath before I go to bed. I run the tepid taps in the one remaining bathroom with plumbing and go back downstairs to fiddle with the boiler to see if I can get it to give me lukewarm bubbles without razing the planet. I can't. I go into the sitting room to turn off all the lamps and hear the rain battering down outside. What a downpour, I think, looking out at the dark street which is, I notice - with horror - totally dry.
Damn it, the sound of the deluge is coming from... I run next door... the kitchen, where water is pouring through the ceiling.
Five saucepans, three tea-towels, six bathtowels and a hole gouged into the plasterboard my eldest son - he of the long curling hair and major cause of current blockages - arrives with his girlfriend (maybe she's the one wearing my knickers, I think - then banish it as just too, too weird to contemplate).
'I hope you don't want to use the kitchen,' I say, wringing out my third towel into the sink.
He looks at me the way you imagine aliens would if they suddenly landed in your house in the midst of a domestic incident, as though water streaming through the roof were somehow a quaint custom that everyone indulged in on a Saturday night.
'Nah,' he says eventually, and he and his girlfriend disappear upstairs to their bedroom. It's a testament to my low expectations that I doesn't occur to me that they might have offered to help until after my cold bath the next morning when I leave new man - who arrived, garullous at 1.30 am on his way back from a gig and got arsy with me when I hadn't sufficiently appreciated the effort he had made to come and see me - and went downstairs to make his breakfast.
I clean up all the towels. Empty flying nest, bring - it - on, I think. But then later, after new man has left and I've cleared away all the dishes, miraculous eldest daughter makes me home-made cookies and coffee.
I turn on my laptop and see that New Man has left me to go home and check his internet dating site.
'What do you want - a cup or a mug,' says daughter.
'Oh mug. Definitely, a mug.' I say.
