By all accounts, including his own, Ashley Cole can be an almighty pillock. It isn’t just that he betrayed Saint Cheryl of L’Oréal or took photos of his own tackle in a hotel mirror that found their way to the mobile phone of a topless model.
No. The most damning evidence of Ashley’s titishness came from his own mouth. In his autobiography (which didn’t overly trouble the reprint presses), he described receiving a phone call so distressing that he came close to crashing his car. “I nearly swerved off the road... I was trembling with anger. I couldn’t believe what I’d heard,” he said. The call? To say that Arsenal would pay him only £55,000 a week and not the £60,000 he felt he was worth.
Still. If he and his ex-wife Cheryl Cole have rekindled their relationship and plan to remarry then, genuinely, good luck to them. Nobody knows what makes other people’s marriages tick or what cushion they might offer each other from the showbiz snake-pit. Besides, next to Ryan Giggs, Ashley must now seem like Husband of the Year material. May they have many little Cashleys together.
So, no, I don’t “fear for Cheryl’s sanity” in taking him back. But I do feel sorry for her friends. Because they will now be suffering from “Oh s***” syndrome. This happens when a close friend is dumped or treated badly by her lover. Well-intentioned friends rally round, perhaps volunteering by way of consolation that they never liked him anyway. “You’re better off on your own!” they say, soothingly. “He was boring/thick/irritating/had bad breath.”
The hurt friend cheers up, perhaps chucking in funny anecdotes about occasions when he has “flopped” sexually. Everyone chuckles. Then weeks later the friend coyly announces: “Guess what? We’re back together!” And you find yourself once again chinking wine glasses with a man your friend now knows you nicknamed “Harry-tosis”. I’m afraid I’ve done similar and I’d bet some of Cheryl Cole’s friends have too and are thus saying: “Oh s***.”
Advertisement
But then people are so swift to divorce these days. I often marvel, and I’m not just talking about celebrities here, at how quick couples are to throw in the towel; often, perhaps, riding the momentum of other people’s indignation. Now that you can get a divorce online for £17, many marriages are killed before either party is sure it’s what they really want. Some reports suggest that four in ten people regret their divorce five years later. Some remarry the same person. It is not just the preserve of life’s Elizabeth Taylors and Marie Osmonds.
It must be even harder to resist filing for divorce when the media is cheering you on, telling you you’re a mug if you don’t. But the fact that Cheryl never dropped Cole’s surname, even though she was the more famous of the two, was a clue that her heart wasn’t in it.
We walk a minefield when friends’ relationships falter. Much as they might welcome your character assassination of their husband/wife when they are in despair, think carefully before you unsheath that dagger. Because the chances are that pretty soon they’ll be loved-up again, their trauma a distant memory. While you’ll always be the one who — albeit out of loyalty — bitched about his spotty neck.
It’s snot wrong to hate oysters
Oysters, it’s said, are an aphrodisiac. Casanova reportedly ate 50 for breakfast each day to keep his man-fires well-bellowed. So oh dear, what do we make of the fact that the Duchess of Cambridge happily accepted an oyster from locals while on tour in Canada but the Duke declined, saying “not this time”?
Advertisement
Well, one conclusion we can draw is that William has more sense than his wife. Why anyone would even consider eating oysters, filter feeders that can store a Petri dish of viruses, most commonly the norovirus, inside their shell, utterly baffles me.
Where is the pleasure anyway in swallowing something that has the texture of phlegm?
Because I had that experience for most of winter and let me tell you, it was no delicacy.
My dishwasher gives me nothing
I have long professed hatred for my dishwasher.
Advertisement
It is the squat tyrant in the kitchen, greedily demanding everything — power, water, perfectly aligned crockery, endless detergent tablets, which it furtively spits out, rendering cycles pointless — and giving nothing, except semi-dirty plates, backache and a doubled workload as I scrape, rinse, stack, unstack then scrub with a scourer, wondering why I don’t smash it to pieces with a hammer.
Now a survey reveals that though 70 per cent of us own a dishwasher, two thirds of us avoid using it because we don’t trust it and know we’ll end up doing it by hand anyway. Since even the clean crockery it produces smells like my dog after he’s had a swim in the canal, I am unsurprised. I stopped using mine when I realised that I hadn’t bought a labour-saving device, I’d just bought insanity, with sprinklers.
Fergie’s wisdom of the week
No week should end without another profundity from the Duchess of York. It helps to cut through all the madness in this world. So here’s some wisdom from her new book that is designed to help you face your fears: “Stay where you are,” writes Fergie. “Don’t look up. Don’t look left. Don’t look right. Look down and sit in your space.”
Even if these pearls don’t make all your problems evaporate, they do double up as excellent advice for travelling by Tube.