We’d been married for two years and we were away on a mini-break, which was a rare thing in those days because we had very little money. Also, we’d taken our children with us, because they were very small, so it wasn’t exactly a romantic mini-break. But still. We were on holiday. It was a treat.

The deal was this: we would meet some friends for lunch and have a day at the aquarium with the children, and then we would put the children to bed in the hotel and I would stay with them while my husband would go…

Over the past couple of weeks, it has become fairly clear that the Armie Hammer abuse rumors — which include screenshots of his talk of cannibalism fantasies and details of him carving his initials into a woman’s genitalia with a knife — are going absolutely nowhere. (For more on those, see this fab piece by Carrie Wynn).

Hammer has already been dropped like a stone by both his agent and his publicist, and most of us are cynical enough to understand that when that happens to a previously highly bankable star, it’s usually a hand-washing exercise ahead of confirmed, or…

When I was living alone for the summer in which I left my husband (after my messy, all-consuming, entirely regrettable affair), I remained in touch — at first — with my extramarital lover.

This is how that went.

On the night that our affair was discovered, he held my hands tightly and he said to me, looking into my eyes, “Listen to me. This is the horrendous bit. This bit is going to be awful. But we have to stay strong. We win, at the end of this. We WIN. We get each other.”

I sat in front of him…

One weird thing about the pandemic and its year of various tiers of badly-managed lockdowns is that some of the friends who once lurked in the background of Facebook suddenly became very much front-and-center. Did you notice?

One minute they existed only peripherally, burbling on every few days about how badly their babies were sleeping that week or getting excited about the latest flash sale on Body Shop fruit-scented shower gels. You might almost forget they existed until you collided with them at a school bake sale or in the queue at a parents’ evening.

Then all of a sudden…

Life moved fast when I met my husband. We both were very young and I already had a little girl. Within a year of our first date, we had bought a house together. And within another year we agreed that I would stop taking the Pill, and I was pregnant almost instantly.

The passionate, can’t-keep-our-hands-off-each-other stage ended abruptly when the stick turned blue; we didn’t even notice, not at the time.

This – my second pregnancy – was fully planned, but it did not turn out the way I expected. I was almost instantly uncomfortable. I was bloated before I…

I am a practitioner, in the UK, of what the Americans call “elder law”. (Well, Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul called it elder law, anyway, so let’s go with that). And what that means is that I am regularly involved in helping people to make applications to the Court of Protection, in order that they can be appointed as “deputies” for their loved ones — thus entitled legally to make decisions for them about their property and financial affairs.

For the longest time, I thought that an American “conservator” was the same as a British “deputy”. I thought the…

There’s a tale I’ve been telling myself for as long as I’ve been conscious of those pesky, papery little crinkles under my eyes (thanks, rearview mirror reflection — you really do give me the gift of brutal face honesty, if nothing else). And that tale I’ve told myself is this: “If I had unlimited funds, I would be aging so much better than I actually am in my real life.”

I mean, I’d have weekly facials, wouldn’t I? And blow-dries. A personal trainer. Chef-cooked meals, delivered on the regular. …

My friend Lizzie was in a crisis of a strange sort of loneliness when she met her perfect man. She was married, she had a family, but her marriage was not working and it had not been working for a very long time. And then her children began to leave home. And then her beloved father, for whom she had been caring, died.

That’s when he struck. Yep. That’s when she met her perfect man.

Her “perfect man” secured her — as so many of these men do, as they always have and as they always will — by a…