A MATTER OF TASTE

One of the depressing side effects of divorce or indeed any stressful experience can be the havoc it plays with our weight. Some people turn to comfort eating, others find it impossible to eat properly or regularly. In time, a strict regime of sensible eating is often required to turn things to normal.

I have known both clients and friends flirt with various fad-diets. One of them I recall requires replacing two meals a day with bowls of cereal. I was therefore somewhat surprised to read in the results of a Which survey today that such breakfast cereal contains as much sugar as a helping of chocolate fudge cake premium ice-cream. I’m sorry but if I’m in need of sugar, and there’s a choice between ice-cream and an insipid cardboard-tasting breakfast cereal, I know which way I’d prefer to ingest it.

BREAKING NEWS

There is obviously nothing good to say about swine flu, save that it appears to have snatched the headlines from the global financial crisis. Yours Truly was helping spread the news today when she gave a radio interview but it failed to refer to either topic; instead I was grilled about the opening up of the Family Courts to the press and why Resolution doesn’t think the changes go far enough, for which see my blog entry on Saturday. Mind, I have to say I was a little disappointed to have spent the greater part of yesterday in Darlington County Court without a sniff of a journalist present. I assume that our local reporters view attending court as something of a waste of time, if they can’t actually print what they witness. Hunting down potential flu sufferers or would be holidaymakers now heading for rainy Blackpool rather than Cancun must be far more fulfilling.

Of course some wit has asked me if I expect swine flu to affect the number of divorce cases I’m handling. “Only if I catch it,” I replied.

EVICTION

Last month an eviction took place in the village where I live in the full glare of TV cameras. A man who had been living in a caravan and various ramshackle buildings he had erected in a field was forced to move on when, after 7 years of legal battles, representatives from the planning department accompanied by police moved in to demolish what had become a shanty town for one. Losing one’s home is inevitably an emotional experience and it is something that regularly happens in divorce proceedings when short of splitting a home in two, one or both must leave. The Courts however cry shy of pre-judging who should be able to retain the home, leaving that issue for a final hearing unless and in the meantime it is necessary to intervene for the sake of protecting one of the couple from violence by the other.

How often do divorce solicitors have to warn clients to stay calm in the face of what appear to be overt attempts to cause an inflammatory scene, involve the police and have the unsuspecting other half caught like Professor Plum in the library with the lead pipe in one hand? In the present recession when houses are failing to sell and couples want to separate but can’t, more and more couples find themselves continuing to live together in the same home. If only for the sake of their children, I urge them to remain on civil terms.

UNDER THE SCRUTINY OF THE MEDIA

New rules to open family courts to the media rushed in by the government represent a missed opportunity to allow thorough and effective public scrutiny, Resolution is warning, as it calls for the establishment of a Family Courts’ Inspectorate.

From Monday accredited journalists will be allowed to attend divorce, custody and care proceedings, unless the court has specifically excluded them. But the new rules will not allow journalists to report on what they hear in court and cases not considered newsworthy will presumably continue to be conducted in private.

Resolution believes that:
• The provisions should be further extended to allow journalists to report on specific cases but with appropriate safeguards to ensure anonymity and prevent identification
• An expanded Family Courts' Inspectorate, consisting primarily of lay members should be set up to report on consistency within the family courts.

THE MIGHTY QUEENS OF FREEVILLE

The Mighty Queens of Freeville is Amy Dickinson’s story of her life and the effect upon it both of her own and of her parents’ divorce. It’s easy to read and in places more like a novel than an autobiography. Importantly it is not a tale about divorce itself, so there are no gory details of fallings out (unless you can count reference to an argument about the Prime Minister of Pakistan) nor does it seek to wash dirty linen in public. As Amy says they divorced “nicely.”

What it does do is normalise the emotions that accompany marriage break up, describing how she loved her husband dearly and still did when she woke up the next day, until she remembered that he was leaving her. She recounts how she used to congratulate herself for not calling him and would lie in bed promising not to telephone the following morning either. She recalls the pain at handing her young daughter over for contact, the child’s arms locked around her in an embrace that she could not undo. She even remembers the emotions she encountered as child when her own father left and she visited him and his new partner. She describes dashing from work to collect her daughter from school and building her whole life around their relationship together.

The book is spiced with moments of humour including her first attempts at dating again. She learned to forget to worry about a career and instead concentrate on the family that was important to her, returning eventually to live in the hometown she had grown up in.

She rails at the family values enunciated by politicians and concedes that hers is the imperfect broken unit they attack whilst failing to recognise that, though not perfect, it functions adequately.

There cannot be many Agony Aunts prepared to be so honest in print and in acknowledging that divorce runs through her family “like an aggressive chromosome” she also thanks her family, particularly the women in it, for the support they gave her in helping her come to terms with and handle the experience.

Any complaints? Only that I thought it should have been longer.

My thanks to the publishers Hyperion for forwarding a copy of the book to read and review.

Smithtown has first female Conservative town chair (Spin Cycle) - Newsday.com

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