The Jilted Wives Club, comprising Loelia, Juliette and me, lost six stone between us, shortly after we were all kicked into touch by our better (or worse) halves.  

Juliette, in her miniscule hot-pants, was soon pulled by a blind man in Costa's, and then a little later, by two men who could see, and therefore could properly appreciate her pert bum.

Loelia was repeatedly hooted at by lorry drivers on the Launceston A30, as we chatted outside Spud-U-Like. They couldn't miss her Elle MacPherson giraffe-legs encased in skin-tight jeans and long boots, and her thick, brunette Kate Middleton hair waving in their slip-stream. Revered Son at the time awarded Loelia the honour of 'fittest mother in the school'.

Meanwhile, immersed in my diet of misery, fags and Birds Eye Frozen Platters For One, I found keeping the weight off quite easy for a year, and for the first time was able to branch out into coloured clothing!

We were proud of ourselves.

But now I am back to black.

As all women know, black reliably coordinates with itself, and makes you look thinner, as well as not showing the dirt, so I wear the same outfit every day until it smells - each one normally lasts a bit over a week before I put it in the washing basket.  I alternate each black outfit with my blue riding clothes, which I wear every other day until they really smell.    Occasionally I may branch out into navy, and I celebrate summer with a little white, to lift the black.  My walk-in wardrobe as a result is terribly dark, and not very exciting.

This morning, when I came down for breakfast, Esteemed Partner commented, "Black again?"

I am beginning to find myself really getting old.  I have got much fatter and much wrinklier this year - my 54th.  Wrinkles AND spots. That really is unfair.  I am trying new moisturisers - I've moved from Boot's Protect and Perfect, to Neal's Yard Frankincense Nourishing Cream, to Olay's Regenerist 3 which has apparently got special peptides in it. Nothing's working, and they all seem to curdle with any foundation I may try putting on top.  I don't suppose my diet of Cava, fags, riding  through the horizontal rain of Dartmoor, and getting divorced, are terribly helpful for my complexion, nor my belief
that it's good to get sunburnt because you go brown more quickly that way.

Nobody's commented on my demise in the looks department yet, except the children who have cheerfully advised me that I am beginning to look like Granny.

Meanwhile Ex is, annoyingly, looking better every day!  He appears to be keeping to the diet and regime prescribed by his personal trainer, and fifty year old men, with their greying temples, do tend to look better than fifty year old women, I suppose.

I am so grown up I invited him to the dinner party for our friends the other day, once I had checked that Esteemed Partner was happy about the idea.  It was payback for him driving Revered Son home for me, without query or moaning.  Ex is just the best company, and I was really pleased that he joined us.  He helped make the evening go with a real swing, no matter how surprised our friends were to see him at the table!

The children and I are utterly intrigued and full of conjecture about what the next lady he introduces us all to will be like. I think he might prove happier with a straightforward outdoorsey-type who camps, rather than the ruthless and manipulative film-star lookalikes he has favoured of late.  His oldest and most loyal friends are all very grounded people.  Would you believe  that  during his public speaking gigs, when he goes on about how he  'did it all for his family', women send him napkins with "I want to have your babies" written in lipstick on them!  Whatever he does,  I think the children and I are going to have to wait a while before our curiosity is satisfied!

God, if it were as difficult and expensive to get married as it is to get divorced, I am sure there would be far fewer marriages, and far fewer divorces as a result.  That would put a lot of lawyers out of business!

My lawyer charges £25 for every email sent and received by her, even if it's just one word long!  I emailed her at vast expense saying "Sorry I havent been very polite recently, but I feel I can't email to say 'thanks' if it costs me twenty-five quid every time!"

I discovered from some form that a Decree Nisi, if that's how you spell it, was issued last November. News to me. Haven't a clue what it means.  Anyway, apparently our financial arrangements have been 'sealed' so I am now officially broke, and am about to go overdrawn for the first time since I was 35.  And I have just signed a thing applying for a 'Decree Absolute' which means we should be divorced in a few weeks time.

Hurray! At bloody last! This has all taken so long - the process started back in October 2009 - that I feel I hardly care any more.  Although it must be weird being a divorce lawyer, or in 'family law' or whatever they call it, because there is absolutely nothing pleasant for the poor clients about anything to do with the experience, except possibly the sick sort of adrenaline rush you get when  documents affecting the rest of your life suddenly appear in you Googlemail Inbox.

The worst bit was writing down all our belongings and allocating what to whom. Walking from room to room listing them all, it brought back memories of eighteen years ago when life was all so exciting, moving into our new home, deciding where all his antiques and glassware, and our wedding presents still arriving from Harrods and John Lewis,  would go best - the years ahead beckoning in a sunny sort of way, right into our dotage.  We've agreed that he's going to keep all his family's 'wealth' - including six Royal Worcester miniature porceleine coffee sets, and I will keep the modern things you can't sell, such as curtains.

Let's hope he doesn't decide to take everything away immediately, or I won't have anywhere to put things down on.

Champagne three days in a row! Can I really plead poverty?

Champagne at my sister's house in Fulham to toast Beloved Daughter's 11th birthday.  Champagne at Saddlers Hall in the CIty, to start a family lunch under chandaliers for 49. And champagne at lunch on Sunday in Wimbledon Village - because the sun's shining and we're feeling good.

Life continues in its crazy surreal trajectory, not helped by staying up drinking and smoking til four in the morning at my best friend Annabelle's house in Putney, at the beginning of the weekend.  It felt so comfortable, and I was concentrating to remember every sage word that fell from her lips, and I just didn't feel tipsey at all. It takes a while to feel normal again after all that though, especially if you're sharing a bed with a Beloved Daughter who suffers from eczma and kicks.

Tonight I complete my first three consecutive nights spent in one place, in three weeks. I can't wait to fall back to earth. I returned from London to two enquiries about the Range Rover and a man and a woman arranged to come and see it, between Beloved Daughter's and my ride to Princetown for lunch; and a dinner party  for my best local friends in the evening.

I leap off my wonder-horse and throw her out into her field in the rain, and  inspect the Range Rover, which I haven't looked at in ages.  It has earth all round the bottom, muddy wheels and tyres.  I rummage around in Ex's old Bothie and find a plastic container full of bottles of car cleaning stuff. It's raining though - what good is wax in that? I half-heartedly fill a bucket with tepid water and rub some of the mud off bits of the car with a small flannel.  I squirt the tyre-cleaner onto the muddy tyres, where it stays looking like white goo, and it is time for the potential buyers, armed with £7000 in cash, to arrive.

"I am sad," I explain to the overweight lady, "because if you buy it, I know it's gone and it's worth more than £7000, but if you don't buy it I will be sad too."

They look around it, noting the dent, the scratches and the chewed bit.  Luckily when the man presses the button to make the car go up and down, it seems to do its thing, as I am leaning against it at the time and nearly fall over. They open the back door and all my muddy washing water suddenly gushes out.  Then they drive off in it, leaving their Jaguar with its personalised numberplate, as surety.

They're rather a long time.  I have been too trusting.

Eventually the doorbell rings.  It's the lady.

"I think it's run out of diesel," she explains.

Oh God, it's done it again. That bloody fuel indicator.  Says there's 100 miles of fuel left, when there's none, and my potential buyers have been stranded in the rain.  Bloody car.  Lying again.

I join them in the hurricane and (happily) find a left-over gallon of diesel to help them get up the last few yards of driveway.

The couple say they will call me in an hour or two, when they've had time to think about it over a meal at the Plume of Feathers in Princetown, where the horses, Freya and I have just had lunch.  The call will interrupt my dinner party, but what the Hell.

It never comes.

A big black man with a sticker on his chest saying 'Gift' stood in front of me.  What a funny name!

I love Speeding Courses - you meet a total cross-section of the world at them.

We were divided into 'the red team' and 'the green team' and Gift went off with all the other reds, most of whom looked younger than the greens.  I suspected that they had all done something really bad, rather than going 32mph in a 30.

We trooped in silence (apart from a very large woman wearing biker boots who was observing at the top of her voice what a profit they were making from 20 of us all paying over £100 to attend this course), into a characterless very hot rectangular off-white room; and I sat down next to a bloke with a beard whose sticker said 'Anoy'.  I looked again to discover it actually said 'Andy'.

I thought what a terrifying experience this must have been for my mother, aged 82, who had been caught by a camera doing 34mph (about her top speed); who would have been sitting in the same room a couple of months earlier, wondering what was in store for her, knowing that she has spent her entire life trying to be responsible, to please people, and to behave herself generally, surrounded by the 'great and the good', or the 'great unwashed', or whatever you call normal people who wear t-shirts, hoodies, surfer shorts, and trainers, accessorised with crew cuts and tatoos - sights she's not really used to in her little Dorset hamlet tucked away from the world.

I, on the other hand, knew exactly what to expect.  We were not 'here to be punished.' I had already noted the matey greetings of the advanced driving instructors welcoming us onto the course, with prolific use of Christian names.  And I knew that I would stick out as the most glamorous, best educated, funniest, cleverest, most perceptive and best dressed of the entire motley crew attending.

Wrong.  A lady from Essex, also in biker boots, turned to the big lady and said "You ought to be a comedienne on telly you know." Oi - wot about moi?

Anoy, or Andy, turned out to be cleverer at answering their simplistic questions than I was, and against my better judgement turned out to be the natural leader of our little group.  I think he probably does pub quizes.  He already knew that in 2004 there had been 2,600 deaths on the UK roads.  Or something like that. And he had the temerity to argue with some of the facts presented by the nice people taking the course.  There was also a very funny lorry driver from Newton Abbot who does 130,000 miles a year. Difficult not to get clocked from time to time, with that mileage I would imagine.

His big bug-bear is middle-lane hoggers, as his juggernaut has an inhibitor or whatever they're called that won't let him drive faster than 52mph.  The thing that makes me really cross, which I loudly voiced, although I know I was a little bit pink with heat and embarrassment at my  loud posh accent, is old people.  Dawdlers.  Who make people like me do stupid things and cause accidents.  The shy, boring foreign granny who had described her husband dying in a bus station, looked rather alarmed at my vehemence.  I'm sure she's one of them. They should all take tests at 70.

The jolly man taking the course said we were the chattiest group he had ever taken, and he was sure we would want to be away on time. Probably meaning he did - we were all having a lovely time.  The three hours simply flew, and even the plain digestive biscuit and cheap coffee were a pleasure.

And then all fell apart.  I was wearing Jaeger black trousers, high black suede boots, and a top quality black coat from Frank Usher, my wardrobe as ever bought half price in the sales and in Clarks Shopping Village. I looked rich - well I hope I did anyway.  We wandered back to our cars, and there was Marvin, patiently waiting for me, in his unobtrusive friendly way.  Everyone else had new gleaming Toyota's and Honda's, which they could open as they walked towards them, using their remotes.  I fumbled with the key in Marvin's lock, dived in, reached for my mobile phone and drove off, averting my gaze away from them all, eyes on the road, never, probably, to see a single one of them again.

The bathroom is along a corridor and, if I wasn't the only guest, I would have to share it with several other people.  It has lino on the floor and is painted light blue.  The towel rail appears warm, but the room is icy.  The bath and shower gel, body lotions, shampoo and conditioner are all in pump dispensers.

I wander back to my room, my modesty protected (just) by the B&B's tiny towel.  There are no pictures on any walls, and no telly in my room, the curtains are thin, and the 'tea and coffee making facilities' are shared, in an area just outside it.  I am cold, as the snow starts coming down again, and the duvet is rather small.  All is explained when the hosts tell me later that there is no central heating, but only a lovely log burner in the rather plain sitting room downstairs, which you can fill up with logs at  will, while you enjoy the small telly.  It is all very simple and surprisingly cosy.

I am totally cheered up.  I feel a whole different person from yesterday.  This is real farmhouse B&B, and the hosts are delightful, friendly, chatty, easy-going, young, and can't do enough to be helpful.  A couple of years ago they won a 'Best Farmhouse B&B' award in the Sunday Times.  It's obvious that being a nice host counts almost as much as the quality of the service that you offer.

I put the daffodils I bought for £1 from the Co-op  into a coffee cup of water, and excitedly ponder upon the fact that I am quite justified in charging nearly double what I am paying here.

Helen, the proprietor, on hearing my story and my plans, whizzes off to get me her 'setting up a B&B' book, and I discover that what I am offering is called 'boutique B&B'; or 'complete home hospitality B&B' along the lines of the very expensive Wolsey Lodges.  I have spoken to a couple of friends about those.  My friends pulled out of the arrangement when they were told exactly what sized towel they had  to offer guests.

The book tells me that a 40% occupancy is good.  My hosts say they're at 25%+; which they're pleased with, and they spend days a week on their marketing efforts and are always open and available.  Um.  If I am putting myself forward as the most expensive B&B on the moor, only available during weekdays of school term times, for a minimum two people for two nights; hot tub or no hot tub, we're not looking at a lot of punters.  I might have to re-think this.

Perhaps I might need to eat humble pie and go back cap in hand to Alastair Sawday after all, for his rich and exclusive client list.  What the hell.  It will all have to wait until I get back from Esteemed Partner's old trimaran in Portugal.  I am typing this up on one of Bristol Airport's computers at £1 for every 10 minutes internet access.  Luckily it's a very nice computer and keyboard,  but I'm buggered if I'm going to keep paying for the privilege, while Ryanair keeps calling out the Faro flight.

It all seems to be coming together though.  I just need to call Sashka and Karen before I board to let them know that ...... oh what was it now?

Yesterday was the annual Boscastle Football Match between all the boys in Revered Son's year from his old school.  The most interesting aspect of the midday event was either the choice of clothing worn by formerly glamorous Mums, ensuring they stayed warm in an easterly gale blowing across the cliffs direct from Siberia; or the sloe gin/champagne cocktails served in large, real glass glasses by self-styled 'Barman Bill'.

We endured three hours of it, as I cruised carboots scavenging smoked salmon sandwiches, because my life has been too difficult recently to make up a picnic of my own for myself or the children.

Then some of us reconvened to the Hosts' kitchen where the merriment continued. The left-over revellers comprising, typically, Her, Ex, Me, and a couple of others who made a fairly rapid exit.  At last, finally, She disappeared, so I could  relax, and then Ex went too, leaving me to enjoy myself with my lovely Host friends.  But then the door opened and OMG - She reappeared, with... Bevan!

Blimey - what a shock!  I felt quite wobbly! I'm not really sure why.  I was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by 14 year old boys, with a cup of coffee and a glass of Cava in front of me, and fag in hand.

I found myself competing with Host, who had also been at Eton at the same time, yelling, "Do you remember ME?!"

"No do you remember ME?!"

"Oh only my sister? Bugger.  Everybody always remembers her.."

He started talking Green Wellie Shooting with Host so eventually I thought it time to depart in Marvin for my B&B which costs £32.50 a night.  As I left, Host showed my around his outside cottage which he aims to let via Ultimate Home Stays.  We're all at it.  It is doing his head in how much work he has left to do.

As I drove home I felt a bit tearful. No home, no Range Rover, my family spread all over Europe, Twiglet off to Kathy's for a week. All downsized.  All because of Her, still enjoying herself yacking away introducing the new boyfriend, who's not half as charismatic, charming or good looking as Ex, just richer,  to all our friends.

But then I thought what a funny world.  I actually rather enjoy being anonymous, in my funny old car, playing all my favourite songs on my i-trip, off to God knows where, where someone else will do my washing and cook my breakfast.  I can just lie in the bath and read my new book called "An Unusual Love Story" I have just bought at the co-op, and then watch telly, while tucking into prawns and yet more Cava.

Ex's old office bit back on Saturday.

I've always hated what he called 'The Bothie'.  It is the sort of shed beloved by men, for escaping from their wives. It is where Ex and his team used to prepare his polar expeditions.  The only time I set foot in it was to make tea or to find things of extreme urgency that he had lost or forgotten, that he needed while he was away.  He has totally cleared it of all things polar now, but I still experience waves of stress every time I open its door.

Since Ex left, Revered Son bribed his 82 year old granny to sign the form at the hardwear store, allowing him to purchase cans of spray paint in black, blue and red.  The next morning I discovered that he and his friend and sprayed the entire building, inside and out, with graffiti, saying things like "Cheryl Cole Shagable" (sic).  Ex took the defacing of his beloved Bothie very well, and Revered Son has since repainted the inside white, and it now houses some old sofas and a ping pong table.

I opened the door of the Bothie to show it to my guests, shortly after their arrival on Saturday, explaining to them how much I hated it, although teenagers and men seem to like it for no obvious reason to me. As I talked the door took on a life, or death, of its own, and a panel slowly fell out, landing on the earth below. Then a second one went 'plonk' too.  I looked down to see a third panel slowly sliding down, and then a fourth.  By now the whole of the bottom half of the door was missing.  I carefully piled up the planks of wood against a nearby wall, and continued with my tour of the house that Sashka, Kathy, Esteemed Partner and I had worked so hard on to make look immaculate.

By the time I had finished the tour and reached Granny's house in Dorset, I found myself very upset by the entire experience of renting my home out to strangers, and was relieved to be spoilt silly by her for two days, during which time I have slowly regained my old composure.