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fires burning while he earned a wage.
    How naive I was. When the last of the children were finally old enough not to need me full-time and I began to explore plans for some kind of part-time work, my husband announced he was leaving me. For a 22-year-old model. Who was pregnant with his fourth child. The years I had put into creating a stable home environment counted for nothing. The story of my anger and my recovery have been documented. Suffice to say, I was devastated but I got over it, and today I am happier than I have ever been.
    But what interests me is the trophy wife my husband seemed to think it was his right to acquire, much as a man of his position might crave a chauffeur-driven Bentley or membership of the Garrick Club. Of course I can’t speak for the second Mrs Norton, but what I have observed in general, is a fascinating new breed of trophy wives, women who seem to think their whole function is to be provided for, while giving their husbands nothing in return.
    If they are rich enough, they employ a chef; if not, the poor husband must make do with TV dinners. Ditto a cleaner. If they can’t afford one, then the husband must simply live in squalor. The children are dumped in nurseries or looked after by nannies. This does not stop the new breed from constantly complaining how exhausted they are and demanding the husband spends every moment of the weekend taking the brats to the park, so they can enjoy their ‘me time’.
    More and more I bump into men my age who are bitter and disappointed at the non-working wives they have acquired. ‘I wouldn’t mind providing for her and my daughter if she just occasionally did something for me,’ whispered a shattered husband to me recently. ‘But she doesn’t clean, she can’t cook and she can’t even seem to get our child potty-trained. I thought relationships were meant to be about give and take, but I do all the giving and she does all the receiving. I’d divorce her, but I’ve already lost one wife and I just can’t face doing it again.’ ‘My wife’s so vacant, not only does she never throw dinner parties, she never wants to meet anyone outside her little circle of other pampered wives,’ said another. ‘She’s boring and completely self-obsessed.’
    But now, it seems, the tide is turning. I couldn’t possibly speak for my own ex-husband, but from other twice-married men I hear rumblings of discontent as they realize the price attached to their decorative little trophies and how well off they were with their first hard-working spouses, who either laboured at home or in the office, or both to provide them with the standard of living they deserved. So take heed you leeches, you parasites! Your time is nearly up. There’s no such thing as a free ladies’ lunch.

4
    It was a grey Tuesday in January. In the offices of the Seven Thirty News the temperature was at fever pitch. Gossip had been circulating for weeks ever since Jonathan Chambers, the channel’s genial head of news and current affairs in charge of hirings, firings and budget had ‘retired’ sooner than expected to be replaced by Roxanne Fox or ‘Foxy Roxy’ to give her her office nickname, who was already proving to be about as generous with the company purse strings as a nun with her sexual favours.
    Last night the rumours had solidified like cold lava into hard news when it was confirmed that Chris Stevens, the programme’s bufferish editor since its launch a decade ago, had suddenly ‘resigned’. His replacement, it was announced, in a short press release, was to be Dean Cutler, poached from the BBC.
    ‘So what do we know about this Dean guy?’ Lana, the newsdesk secretary, asked, twisting the gold chains round her neck with her claw-like hand. Lana was a forty-something single mother of three and any threat to her livelihood was to be taken very seriously.
    ‘He’s young,’ said Luke Norton, looking up from the news list for that evening’s show. He’d read it about six