Charmed life

OK, we've gone back to work, we've gone back to the gym (or should have), children have gone back to school, men have gone back to their mistresses. And good. I'm glad. It's just been too long, this particular fiesta. I mean, can anyone really say they did anything useful with the last two weeks? Unless you went skiing/to a very sunny place/to somewhere all turreted in Scotland, then I don't think you did.

To the horror of our friends and family, my soon-to-be-ex and I decided to spend Christmas a deux in the matrimonial home.

Christmas Eve: we decide to have an alternative Christmas befitting our dysfunctional family - stuff the turkey, we'll have lobster instead. So we buy two live lobsters, come home and wonder where to put them. S-T- B ex has a bright idea - he strides down to the bottom of the garden and puts them in the pond. I know this is wrong. I am appalled at the thought of the texture and aroma of the pond, but as this is the last Christmas we will probably ever spend together, I am making a big effort not be critical or provocative, so I say nothing. We go out to buy each other Christmas pressies - yep, even stocking fillers, except this year I somehow know it won't be diamonds and he knows it won't be a Mont Blanc.

When we get home we look in the pond, and you guessed it - they've croaked. There are two pitiful ex-lobsters bobbing around in the green bog that is our pond, being watched quizzically by the cats. S-T-B ex boils them to death - well, to second death - in lots and lots of wine, and still the kitchen just smells of pond.

Christmas Day: friends risk marring their day by coming to our dysfunctional household for a drink. When they go we finish the bottle of champagne, and then another, and generally put off the evil moment when we will have to consume the lobster. After opening our presents (from him: "Does My Bum Look Big In This?" - the diary of an insecure woman), we down another bottle of something too expensive to have downed so quickly, and at 10pm attack the lobster with the pliers.

Boxing Day: we are alive! My mother wants to know whether we might be "back together". I think she had some crazed notion that we would be overcome by the spirit of Christmas and shag each other senseless under the Christmas tree. I have to tell her that, apart from the fact we don't have a needlefast tree this year, it was never on the cards. I tell her that we have almost eaten the top tier of our wedding cake (the one you're supposed to keep for the Christening).

Resolutions for 98? More turkey. Less lobster. Some realism.