I ask my ex-wife if I can buy her a drink and we find a place. It has taken a long time to get to this table...

Published: 21:42, 28 July 2026 | Updated: 21:53, 28 July 2026 It begins with a damaged rug from John Lewis and ends with a joyous afternoon in the pub in the company of a woman with whom I once communicated only through lawyers. First, that rug, a dark-blue number, perfect for the hallway and knocked down in the sales. For days, I think it’s the light but no, there, running across the middle, is a flaw, a faint white line – the kind of thing I could live with up until the point at which it drove me completely insane. The return is a simple process. If I drop the rug off at a local Waitrose, I’ll get my refund. Stricken with a significant back injury caused by placing a carton of milk in the fridge some days earlier, I’m unable to carry the rug and so secure from the boy a promise that he’ll visit and oblige. Three weeks later, I’m as fit as I’m ever going to be and the rug’s still lying there, rolled up on the hall floor. The boy, 16 and nocturnal since the World Cup began, has failed repeatedly to do this favour and it’s become a grinding battle. I could carry it myself but that’s not going to happen. The boy said he’d do it and he’s damned well going to do it. He doesn’t do it. The rug remains. I call and message the boy each day. He promises to come over. He does not. During spells of insomnia, I can see he’s online, guaranteeing he’ll sleep through yet another day. Exasperated, I call his mother, urging a unified approach, a classic pincer movement. If she can get him to my place, I add, I’ll stand them both lunch. That I can make such an offer at all would once have seemed impossible. When things fell apart 14 years ago, they kept falling apart, and then fell apart some more in the sort of way these things so often do. Anger, hurt, pride, bloody-mindedness, all of those conspired to make things more difficult than they had to be. But time renders those wreckers increasingly embarrassing, particularly when there are children involved. Once the lawyers have gone and the paperwork’s done, you’ve still got to work together for them and, after a while, snapping at each other when you’re arranging a pick-up starts to feel profoundly unchic. It began with a damaged rug...  Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in War of the Roses The rug is delivered to the supermarket. In the restaurant, the boy’s half asleep and trudges through plates while his mother and I discuss a new project she’s working on. A gifted comic writer – she spent years writing for the satire website The Daily Mash when our two kids were younger – she’s already shown me some of her new work. It is, as was ever the case, exceptionally good. I suggest ways in which she might use a loser ex-husband as a comic foil. This is cheerleading more than anything else. She’s a far better writer than me. She doesn’t need ideas. The boy stretches and huffs until we break and agree he may depart this unlikely scene and return to the sanctuary of his pit. And then I ask my ex-wife if I can buy her a drink. We were always an unlikely-looking couple – she tall and model-slender, me short and shaped like a bin-bag full of sausage meat – but we have a shared sense of humour, rare to find, and after a miserable few days, I really need a laugh. We settle at a table in a place down a lane and talk about the weirdness of dating. About going out and meeting people and finding all the things about them that give you the ick. ‘Men online lie about their heights all the time,’ she informs me. ‘I’ll agree to meet a guy for a coffee, he’ll say he’s six feet, and I’ll turn up and he’s shorter than me.’ ‘Why can’t you date shorter men?’ I ask. ‘Do you need me to tell YOU that?’ she replies. I, teetotal since 2001, sip ginger beer while she works her way through the cocktail list, favouring what they’re calling ‘spirit forward’ choices, these days. It has taken us a long time to get to this table. What was supposed to be an elegant separation soon turned into the stuff of cliché. We were far less Chris and Gwyneth and far more War of the Roses. Within weeks, what had started with sadness and regret over the fairly rapid failure of our marriage had turned into one of those things that happens in other, stupider people’s lives. Recognition of one’s part in that does not necessarily bring closure. If anything, the stubborn and foolishly proud man may be vulnerable to allowing his embarrassment to prolong hostilities. Was I that kind of man? Which of us is qualified to say? When we met, 20 years ago, it was her weird, unique sense of humour that floored me and as she sips her cocktails and tells me of romantic disappointment, I make a real effort to keep up. A laugh from her, I realise, still means something. I’m behaving precisely as if I’m on a date. Of course, I’m not and there’s no plot twist that sees us rush into each others arms, for evermore to be as one. Neither of us would inflict that on the other. But if my feelings are not romantic, they are not neutral. In moments of stress, I am prone to flashing back in my mind to times of fear or anxiety. Often these will be from childhood, but a frequent memory is the look of shock on the face of the midwife when, after our daughter was born, my ex suffered a fairly heavy post-partum haemorrhage. Even in the years when I might have told you on oath that I despised this bloody woman, I would return to that moment and feel the intense fear of losing her that I did on the morning of February 2, 2008. It is, I think, very difficult to continue hating someone when, at times of pressure, you keep reminding yourself how much you once loved them. Eighty quid later (and I’m on ginger beer, remember), we head out into a sunny Friday evening and walk back up the lane towards the main road. We could be a couple on a first date. And then a slight moment of awkwardness. There’s not been so much as a handshake since we split all those years ago and now my instinct is to hug her. Too much, I think, and instead reach out and squeeze her arm. She doesn’t flinch. I walk home feeling lighter than I have for days. Back in the flat, I receive a message informing me she’s home, safe. I’m glad she is and I’m glad she wanted to tell me. I open up the laptop and start looking at new rugs.