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THE GREAT YEAR OF DIVORCE

The world didn’t change. We changed. The world has always been like this, a bit grey, a bit cold, a bit crap, a bit dull. Ain’t nothing can be done about that. Time races on – the skin sags, our hair thins like icecaps, and bellies expand slowly like the bloated skin of a tired old singer living out his final, autumn years in a deserted casino in Vegas.

At thirty the world changes. Priorities are bent. No longer is life just stuff that happens between sleep and work. Life is the stuff that you live for : why you’re alive. Friends. Family. Children.

Slowly it happens. You turn from a child to a boy. A boy who desperately tries to get laid. Then from a boy to some kind of boy-man-thing. Neither child or boy, or man. Some kind of weird hybrid, some mutant changing from one to another. Hairs grow in strange places. Voices sink like ships. You take jobs, you go to work, you do things because you want more pocket money, you maybe rent a place of your own, somewhere Mum and Dad aren’t, and.

And one day you’re an adult. And you don’t even know it. There’s no rite of passage. No birthing ceremony, no moment where you bungee jump off a bridge a boy and arrive back a man. Nothing like that.

Everything changes slowly. Suddenly the stakes are higher then they’ve ever been. Sex isn’t just a quick fumble anymore, it’s something else. All you ever wanted to express was that maybe you really really liked that person (or maybe didn’t like them very much). You only ever wanted to bring happiness and joy to the world. Instead you could maybe bring an unwanted life. Or a child. Or if you were lucky, maybe just a dose of herpes. Which is like an overdraft – it’s for life.

You don’t get together and split up anymore. You get married then divorced. You don’t just go steady – you talk of love, you talk of marriage, childrens names, divorce. Where you want to live, how much you earn, how much you can keep in this world.

And this is the Great Year of Divorce. Three major relationships, one of mine, two of my friends, have floundered recently – though mine is one you may have heard about and fell over some eighteen months ago. The weird thing is that even though I’ve had no contact with this person for nineteen months (to the day) as I type bar the odd e-mail talking in veiled threats about solictors, she’s still legally my wife, though she long since abdicated the role.

I dearly wish that they would just put forward a “no fault” divorce that you could do for say £50. After all getting married only costs about £30 (if of course, you do it on the cheap).

But these days the stakes are so much higher : if you’re going out with someone for even a few months people start to think about the big words of responsibility : co-habitation. Children. Commitment. Mortgages. Marriages. All these things.

There was a time when life was simple, and even now we too can live life simply. Love, life, and laughter. And maybe remember a time when it wasn’t all mortgages and bullshit and commuting on crowded trains. I think I need a holiday – care to join me? I’m told the past is a nice place to visit.

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