funny anniversary

On April Fools' Day 9 years ago, an official-looking envelope landed on my doormat.

By some prescient fluke, a County Court in the Home Counties had seen it fit to grant me a decree absolute that day.

It was a fitting end to a union that had been one big joke from the start.

I met Dave at a bar in northern France I had gone to in order to try and locate one of my university friends.

There he stood, the very picture of the English lad freshly turfed out of Essex and onto French soil by some desultory employment market forces.

"I'm from Epping, where the sausages come from", he mumbled between two gulps of beer.

Never has a chat-up line been more loaded with idiocy, a preemptive tactic against attraction that was probably designed to repel yet intrigued the contrarian that I am.

One beer led to another and soon we were walking the streets of Amiens in search for a late-night watering hole.

We found it, and with it a nightly strip-tease show.

Ho hum.

"This is different", blushed my 17-year-old self in an attempt to appear fashionably blase.

Unsurprisingly it was the same broad-minded 17-year-old who later that night - or earlier the next morning - lost her virginity to this spitting image of Sean Bean while some classical military march played in the background.

While the act itself was predictably messy and rather pleasureless, the memory of his homemade mezzanine bed constructed out of wall wood paneling endures.

"I like a little accompaniment when I come", he offered by way of explanation.

It did at that point cross my mind that the whole edifice upon which we were cavorting might collapse.

It didn't, but he did, reeking of sweat.

Only when I later attempted to have a shower in his mould-infested bathroom did I discover that this man's pit pong pride ruled out the use of any anti-perspirant potions.

There on the shelf stood a forlorn expensive deodorant spray bearing the name of a well-known local parfumerie, still in its original wrapping and arrogantly displaying one inch of dust.

Somehow, neither this fact nor the presence of another woman in his life put me off.

We continued our bizarre mating ritual for a few months until he was posted to Belgium.

I therefore arranged to transfer to a Belgian university, by which time he had lost his job and moved back to his parents', minus the homemade bed but with his mattress secured to the roof of the car.

Once a month, I'd brave the 4-hour ferry crossing from Ostend to Ramsgate and the long train journey to Essex just for a whiff of those armpits.

At the end of the academic year, we set up home together in a new shoebox with paper-thin walls and catastrophic plumbing in Hertford.

A year later, we got married - I was 19, he was 28.

In the words of my embittered francophone mother on the wedding day, 'On ne donne pas une fleur à un cochon'. [You don't give a flower to a pig].

I was defiant and determined.

So defiant and determined indeed that a year after we tied the knot I absconded to North America for a whole month to take stock.

I greeted him at Gatwick Airport with one chillingly delivered sentence that put paid to our conjugal life.

"I want a divorce".

He didn't speak to me for 3 days.

My lawyer Angela advised that there wouldn't be any difficulty in filing for divorce as I had more than enough reasons to do so.

It took another 18 months until our legal union was dissolved, as painstakingly undone as it had been constructed.

All that remains of him in my life today is his last name, which I have elected to keep as it is far easier to spell than my exotic maiden name.

And a letter from his then girlfriend.

"I'm watching you bitch", she wrote all the way from Liverpool.

I pictured a scouse version of The Bionic Woman with fatter thighs.

The vision elicited simultaneous derision and pity for that dumpy housewife who still hadn't mastered joined-up writing, spelling or epistolary basics.

My husband had told me they met in a pub and he had "liked her lip".

He can't have been referring to her oratory skills.

They got engaged as soon as the divorce came through.

I only found out by accident thanks to our illiterate postman who couldn't distinguish between "A" and "D" and erroneously forwarded Dave's post to me.