of you to take such a traditional view of marriage,” she replied.
I was confused. I wasn’t sure what was traditional anymore. Was it traditional to stay together or to break up? Did the fact that so many marriages fail mean this was now an expectation—that splitting up was the new normal?
Anyway, no time for philosophy, I needed to take guard quickly because Brett Lee was on his mark and getting ready to deliver another bouncer. And it was a ripper. My wife had decided that I would move out of our house from Monday to Friday, but move back in again at the weekends. This would have the benefit of allowing her to look after the children during the week, her ‘traditional’ role, while also allowing her the freedom to “explore her relationship” with her soul mate at the weekends—a less ‘traditional’ role in my view. Or put another way, I would be free from household distractions during the week to enable me to concentrate on work and earning the money to keep the wheels turning, my ‘traditional’ role, while she would be free to spend the weekends as she pleased—out on the town, going away or rooting like a rabbit with her soul mate. I imagined that this arrangement would condemn me to hard weekends of running the children around and lonely midweek evenings of TV.
Incredibly, my wife had even found an apartment for me to rent just around the corner from our house. “You will be very happy in it and not too far away,” she told me. She always knew what was best for me. And how comforting that she was prepared to be so considerate and supportive in my hour of need.
I was horrified. How much of this had she, or worse, they planned? Would her soul mate also be moving in with her when I moved out during the week, so they could be together? Would he be perusing my CD collection—“Ah, Ready ‘n’ Willing, the classic Whitesnake album of the late 70s. Your old man has got taste”. What if he forgot his clean undies? Would he think about borrowing a pair of mine? (Obviously they would be far too big for him). Would he sit in bed reading the newspaper in the morning, having a cup of tea, while wearing my dressing gown? Or would he bring his own dressing gown, and leave it hanging behind the bathroom door over the weekend—a permanent reminder of his presence—so that it was ready for him the following week? Would I come home to find a photo of his kids on my bedside table? More appallingly, would he try and take over my role as father—would he make friends with my girls, help them with their homework, make them laugh, dazzle them with his Origami and shadow puppeting skills and take them out for Chinese? All these hideous visions went through my head and seemed to dwarf the more realistic and equally appalling fact, that the main thing he would be doing if he came to stay was boning my wife.
But back to Brett Lee. It was a good ball—short, fast and snorting off the pitch. But no more Gladstone Small, timid tailender, for me. I rocked back on my heels and hit it clean over the boundary. I became Allan Lamb (he is sort of English after all). The look on the cover fielders’ faces as it sailed over their heads was priceless.
“I’m not moving out,” I said. “If you want to be with this guy that’s up to you—but I’m going nowhere.”
It was one of the best decisions I ever made. Much later my lawyer told me that the first thing she asks her clients is “have you moved out?” hoping they haven’t. For most men it’s too late. They do the ‘traditional’ thing, pack their bags and move into an apartment. Here’s a top tip for men going through separation—if you are able to stay put in your own home, then do it. The person living in the family home holds all the aces in the tough months of negotiations and arguments to come.
So the die was cast and the big decisions made. My wife had decided, because I was being so unreasonable about the living arrangements (i.e. not doing what she wanted me to), that she would be the one to move out and that she and her soul mate would find somewhere new to live so that they could be together. How lovely for them! This made things a lot easier for my daughters. They chose to live with me. They were unhappy and angry with their mother for the pain that she had caused us all and were ashamed of the nature of her affair—and they certainly weren’t interested in living with some guy who they hadn’t met and had no intention of meeting. Being able to stay in their familiar home and surroundings with me, when so much of their world was changing, was the best outcome for them and the best outcome for me.
Time raced by and a few weeks later the September school holidays were upon us. Months before, in the time before separation which now felt like years ago, we had planned to go back to England during these holidays as a family to see my father. He didn’t live that long, but the children and I decided we would go anyway; they needed a change of scene and I needed to spend some time with my UK family now that they knew what had happened. I needed some family support. But it would be another bitter-sweet moment—this trip would mark the end of our own time as a family unit. My wife would move out while we were away.
My wife drove us to the airport and we said our final goodbyes at the Singapore Airlines check-in desk. Lots of other people around us were also saying their goodbyes—ours were just a little more final. Sophie, Annabel and I were, officially, a threesome. It was a massive, life changing moment and yet I couldn’t stop thinking of the Genesis album And Then There Were Three and the beginning of the track Many Too Many which kept coming into my head—“Many too many have stood where I stand, many more will stand here too”. Fortunately the vision of Phil Collins proved to be only fleeting and passed once we were on the plane. It was going to be a long, hard flight to London and I didn’t need Phil with me every step of the way.
As many people know, flying with children can be challenging—but it is much more so in my case. My youngest daughter has a fear of the claustrophobia brought about by long haul flying, which is a little inconvenient when I have family on the other side of the world. It means that, at some point in the flight, she will start being sick and then continue in this vein at regular intervals until the end of the journey—at which point a bottle of Gatorade will result in an immediate and miraculous recovery. As she has got older, the onset of the air sickness has been delayed and, on our last trip from the UK a few years earlier, she actually managed to get halfway to Singapore before filling my shoes with chicken or fish (it was hard to tell which it was when it was on the meal tray—and even harder to tell once it had been regurgitated).
We boarded the plane, gently clunked the heads of a few of our fellow passengers with our rather generous volume of hand luggage, and took our seats. I sat in-between the girls in the row of three seats, which would be home for the next twenty-four hours. Tonight’s trip would be my third in four months to the UK and I had become something of an expert in economy class sleeping. This new found ability was not the result of any significant scientific research or analysis, it was simply that I got off my trolley by speed drinking several glasses of wine and passing on dinner. Sleep was then an inevitable consequence. I was pretty sure that my daughter would make it to Singapore in one piece and, in any case, she would wake me up if she felt sick.
Hours later I woke in a slight panic from a dream, in which I had been hog-tied and put in a sack by some strange cowboy, hillbilly type characters, to find that I couldn’t move. I swear I could hear the sound of a banjo being tuned up. However, as my eyes groggily opened, I realised that everything was okay—I had just fallen asleep with my head on the tray table and as a result my back and neck had gone into spasm. I half lay and half sat, bent over the tray table, paralysed but with my eyes open and with a little pool of dribble forming under my cheek. As I remained in my inert state, willing my body back to life, the woman sitting across the aisle caught my eye.
“Your daughter’s been sick,” she growled, looking at me in disgust.
She was right. The poor thing had started her vomiting only forty-five minutes into the flight and had spent the last five hours regularly puking into a sick bag and then going to the toilet to clean up. She didn’t want to wake me and, unfortunately, my well-practiced economy class sleep routine had ensured that I was oblivious to her distress. In hindsight it was fairly obvious that the stress brought
