To cut a long - and rather painful - story short, it reaches the point where we’re not sleeping in the same bed and barely speaking.
Something has got to give.
It does in spectacular style one cold January evening, when we have an argument of epic proportions that wakes Tom from his sleep and probably sets off car alarms down the road.
She tells me she’s leaving me. I tell her that’s fine by me.
…I never think she will, of course, I’m just angry as Hell at that moment.
Anger turns to astonishment and grief as I realise she’s going to make good on the threat.
Two weeks later, Sophie has taken Tom and moved in with Adam and his wife.
I will at this point give Sophie a huge amount of credit for establishing with her family that the split was as much her fault as it was mine. I tried to do the same when explaining things to my relatives.
I think this went a long way in making the break-up easier.
There’s nothing guaranteed to make a separation harder than if the families of those involved end up throwing insults at each other across the battlefield.
When I try phoning Sophie at her brother’s house, Adam does his best in the awkward position he’s in and tries to get her to come to the phone. Sophie won’t - which in hindsight is understandable.
We both got on each other’s nerves so much by this point that any conversation was bound to end in another barnstormer of an argument - something neither of us needed.
I hoped against hope this would be just a temporary measure and we would smooth things over enough to salvage our marriage.
My hopes were in vain.
While we were apart physically, we grew even further apart emotionally. Unlike many break-ups, this emotional parting of the ways was a mutual thing.
Living without Sophie became easier as time went by and I became very aware of the fact that I was rapidly falling out of love with her.
This scared and disappointed me in equal measure. I just couldn’t believe that the strong love I felt for her had slowly bled away over a period of eight years and it was equally hard for me to accept the same thing had happened for her.
But, there it was.
Undeniable and true. No matter how much agonising I did over it, it wasn’t going to change.
If I started to miss my wife less and less, I started to miss my son more and more.
Ever since the day he’d emerged squalling and covered in yucky stuff that doesn’t bear mentioning, Tom had become one of the central focuses of my existence.
I’d gone from seeing him every day to only seeing him once a week.
Sophie understood how much I loved him and was happy to let us spend time together whenever I wanted to.
I get down on my knees and thank God for the person Sophie is.
I hear so much about messy divorces and bad break-ups from friends and colleagues that I'm eternally grateful for the way mine went.
We may be apart and only linked by our son, but I still - and always will - respect and love Sophie for the understanding and maturity she showed during that difficult time.
It would have been very easy for her to become selfish and unreasonable when we split - thousands of people do - but she didn’t. It’s because of this I’ve watched my son grow up and been allowed to be a father.
The divorce proceedings started about four months after Sophie moved in with her brother. Just like our courtship, it went smoothly and was over with a minimum of fuss. Sophie was happy for me to keep the house and I was happy to pay her as large an amount as I could for child support and welfare.
I may moan about my job more than is sometimes necessary - and it may have contributed to our divorce - but it’s always kept me solvent enough to provide for my son, which makes it just about the best job in the world, don’t you think?
Sophie and Tom now live about six miles away in a very nice flat, large enough for both of them. I visit Tom regularly and have him to stay with me as much as possible.
When I do visit her house, Sophie is always welcoming and we find ourselves talking like civilised adults. Sometimes one of us will remember something humorous that happened in our time together and we’ll recount it. We’ll have a good laugh over our cups of coffee while Tom plays in the sandpit I bought for him for Christmas.
Sophie told me about a month ago that she’s started seeing a guy who works for the floristry supplier she uses. I couldn’t be happier for her.
Adam and I still meet up now and again for a pint and he even tried pairing me off with the area-manager from the Currys store where he still works. I thought she was uglier than a bull dog chewing a thistle - and told him so.
I’m single at the moment and am fairly happy to be that way.
I do however have my eye on a rather nice young lady who works as a P.A for a marketing client.
She has blonde hair - and when I think about it, bears something of a resemblance to a certain university student I embarrassed myself in front of many years ago.
Do I regret my marriage to Sophie? Not one bit of it.
Do I regret that our marriage ended because of that clock on the wall and how it reminds us of all the time we lose and can never get back again?
Every single day.
It could have been worse and it could have been better.
On the whole, I’m satisfied with the memories I have and the time we spent together. The best were when the clock on the wall was forgotten and the love we shared made time stop completely.
12.23 pm
35469 Words
Phew. Dark stuff, eh?
Look - even the sky has clouded over a bit in sympathy.
That chapter changed the tone of the book and maybe left you feeling a bit melancholy.
Maybe it’s because of what you read, or maybe you’re just remembering a time in your life when love came knocking and ran off again just as quick.
Better to have loved and lost, I guess…
Best we move on and get to something a little more cheery. That’ll get rid of these unwanted feelings of sadness, and put a smile back on our faces.
Spalding will now consult his internal warehouse of ideas, recollections and musings in an effort to accomplish this:
Give me a minute.
It’s very dusty back here and the shelves go on forever.
I must get some new lighting as well - that fluorescent strip overhead is totally inadequate, especially the way it keeps flickering like that.
Dum de dum.
Bear with me, I’ll find something in a mo…
A-ha!
This will do nicely:
Death.
No, no, bear with me on this, it sounds better than you think.
Who says death can’t be funny in the right circumstances?
It’s all about the context.
Picture this:
Spalding is at a funeral. Not normally what you’d call a laugh riot of an occasion, but in this case it’s true. The person being sent on their final journey is a great uncle of mine.
His name was Gerald and five days ago he suffered a massive coronary that shuffled him off this mortal coil in double quick time.
I hated Gerald.
Everybody hated Gerald.
He was the kind of mean spirited human being who only exists to take up valuable oxygen and make the lives of everyone around him a bloody misery.
He would make a point of puncturing all footballs that had the temerity to end up in his back garden. The kids who’d inadvertently kicked the ball over the fence would come to the door and ask him if they could have it back.
Some would be polite, some wouldn’t. It didn’t matter to Gerald. They all received the same answer of ‘Fuck off, you little sod’, no matter how polite they were.
He would take great glee in stabbing the ball with a handy pair of garden shears and then throw it back over the fence a couple of hours later for the kids to discover the next morning on their
way to school.
He also once hit a thirteen year old boy in the head with his walking stick, because the lad had thrown a water bomb at Gerald’s front room window. Lovely, eh?
The man was also a massive racist.
Not in a humorous, politically incorrect kind of way, but in a deeply disturbing fashion that made you feel sick.
To him, anyone who wasn’t white - and preferably British - was somehow sub-human. Every black person was a stupid nig-nog and every Indian a dirty pakkie. He belonged to the BNP. He might as well have been a card carrying member of the neo-Nazis.
I never received a Christmas present from him once.
Nor did anyone else in the family, despite the fact he would brag as loudly as possible whenever he had the chance about the vast sum of money he’d accrued over the years, through wise investment and canny saving.
His wife, who had the strength of character to stay married to this ogre for forty years, eventually had an affair with one of the gentlemen at her tango class and gratefully fled the nest.
Gerald burned everything of hers she'd left behind and started telling his friends how much of a slut she’d been. He’d also tell of how he would regularly have to give her a slap to keep her in line.
‘Good riddance,’ he said and I’m sure he meant it.
Gerald had been a soldier for twenty five years. During that time he’d never fired a shot and always managed to squirm his way out of any difficult assignments. He stole thousands of pounds of equipment while working as a supply co-ordinator at the barracks and snitched on everyone in his platoon he didn’t like.
A real peach of a human being and an utter coward, I’m sure you’d agree.
He was hated by all with equal measure. Even the people he liked to think were his friends shuddered every time he walked into the pub.
And please don’t think this was the type of man who couldn’t let his emotions show, protecting his inner-child with a cold exterior. A man who was only looking for a bit of help, love and support to bring out the Samaritan within…
He wasn’t.
He once shot a cat dead with an air rifle, because it had made the grievous error of walking innocently across his lawn.
He was, in fact, a cunt of the highest order - and that will be the only time I’ll use that word in this book. I wouldn’t have used it here, but no other word can truly encapsulate my feelings for Gerald.
You’d think that nobody would want to go anywhere near such a man’s funeral. That no-one would be interested in celebrating the life - and mourning the passing of - a man who once ordered his wife to abort the baby he’d planted in her womb because ‘I ain’t having no kid fuck up my life and take all my money’.
In actual fact, the funeral was packed to the rafters.
When Gerald died, the person elected in his will to execute his final wishes was my absent minded uncle Sid.
The rest of the will was naturally as mean-spirited as the man who’d written it and nearly all of Gerald’s accumulated wealth - which I heard was around the two hundred thousand pound mark - was essentially given to his investment brokers.
He had however ear-marked a few thousand for his own funeral expenses.
In a spectacular display of bad judgement, he’s nominated Sid to arrange this grand event, but hadn’t bothered to lay out how he wanted the money spent. I guess in his cruel little mind, he harboured the fantasy that his family would want a lavish ceremony that would see him interred in grand style, in a mausoleum Stalin would have been envious of.
He obviously thought Sid would carry out his wishes in a way Gerald would have found appropriate.
This didn’t happen.
Sid may be absent-minded, but he was also a massive practical joker, who suddenly found himself with several thousand pounds to blow on a funeral for someone everyone despised and was glad to see in the ground.
Sid had plans.
He had plans to make sure Gerald got sent off in a style appropriate to the way people felt about the old bastard.
We all received invites to the funeral.
They had a picture of Hitler on them.
A speech bubble extended from Hitler’s mouth that said:
‘Ve vould like to invite you to the ze funeral of Gerald, ze zecond most evil man of ze twentieth century’.
Gerald was to be buried, not in a huge mausoleum standing in the shadows of a huge cathedral, but in a tiny graveyard in a much smaller, grottier church, just off the motorway, near the local recreational ground.
Drug addicts would go there to shoot-up on a regular basis.
I think the police were slightly perturbed when Sid went into the station one day to ask them which cemetery had the most criminal damage done to it in the area.
It was apparent that Sid had spent as little as possible on the funeral itself and as much as possible on the refreshments to be drunk before and after. The local off licence hadn’t seen so much business since the Queen’s Jubilee.
The invite - printed on very cheap paper - said we were to meet at Sid’s place, where he’d bought a large gazebo with some of the proceeds and stuck it in the garden. There we were supposed to get drunk before wending our way to church.
Friends and family - along with anyone else Sid had fancied inviting to the party - turned up and much drink was imbibed in the two hours before the funeral. Sid warned us not to get too plastered, as he wanted us to enjoy the festivities he’d planned at the service properly.
At the church we sat in the pews, with Gerald shoved in a plain pine coffin at the front. It was completely unadorned and there were no wreaths or messages of condolence anywhere in sight.
The vicar of the church - who probably thought we were all mad and dreadfully unkind - delivered a brief sermon. It was standard stuff about how God loves us all and how glorious it will be when we’ve snuffed it and get to sit by his side in Heaven all day, playing ping-pong and polishing our haloes.
When the vicar was done, Sid got up and started his eulogy:
‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to see Gerald Shearwater buried… and not a moment too soon.’
This was greeted with laughter, some of it a bit guilty.
‘Gerald has gone to be with God now and will be in Heaven as long as it takes the almighty to work out what a bastard he is… and transfer him down to Hell on the next passing goblin.’
More laughter. We’re starting to warm up now.
Sid continued with the eulogy, making passing references to Gerald’s horrendous personality, terrible body odour and gut-wrenching ugliness of body and spirit.
Now we’re laughing quite a lot.
It’s not so much what Sid is saying, but the deeply serious, heart-felt tone he’s employing that makes the whole thing funny. The man has impeccable comic timing and knows how to work a crowd.
He finishes the eulogy with the words:
‘ …and now, we will bow our heads, while a suitable hymn is played, that will see Gerald on his way to the pearly gates. Pray silence for this most revered piece of music.’
Sid bows his head. We follow suit.
What blares out from the church’s antiquated sound system is this song:
Ding-Dong The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard Of Oz.
Now Gerald may not have been a witch. Hell, he wasn’t even female, but the sentiment is entirely appropriate.
That’s it for me…
As soon as I hear the strident high-pitched singing of munchkins and fairies, I’m off to the races.
Laughing like a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide, tears roll down my face and snot dribbles from my nose. I’m pretty drunk by this time as well, making me laugh even harder.
Laughter is infectious as well all know. And the infection spread like wild fire as Ding-Dong really gets going.
Some people held it together enough to start singing along and it was the first time in history a bunch of laughing goons stood wailing: ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead, which old wit
ch? The wicked witch!’ in a place usually reserved for solemn prayers and sonorous hymns.
By the time the song finished, nearly everyone was in drunken hysterics. Sid was unable to continue and announced the service was officially over.
We filed out of the church, wiping our eyes and noses, stumbling out into the overcast afternoon - even the weather hated Gerald.
A few stayed to see the old bastard unceremoniously dumped into the ground and then wound their way back to Sid’s place, where the party got into full swing. Free booze was on offer to all, along with a vast array of tasty treats Sid has spent the rest of the funeral cash on.
The blow-out went on into the night and by midnight I was approaching the bowel loosening stage, so decided to catch a cab home.
I’ve had better nights out than that one, but not by much.
You may be offended at the idea of a large group of people taking the death of one man as a cue to have fun and party. I can only say that if you are, you need to remember the context.
Gerald was very unpleasant.
I’ve given you a few examples of how nasty he was, but it would take a whole book to catalogue all of them.
Never was a more fitting tribute given to a more deserving individual.
There may be some offended, not so much by how we treated Gerald, but by the way we seemingly trod all over the traditions of the church. To these people my response would be: Lighten up.
Religion can be a strong and guiding force in a person’s life, but it can also make mountains out of molehills with great ease.
There are many religions in our world. All different, but all essentially doing the same job of making us feel better about our own mortality.
No matter if you’re Christian, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, you turn to religion to seek some comfort and solace against the spectre of death that’s the one true constant in the universe.
Everything dies.
It’s a scary concept, isn’t it?
So we try to make the inevitability of death more palatable with religion.
Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) Page 12