The House Always Wins

TRACK 6 - sex addiction, divorce and the beginning of songwriting

I’ve often wondered if sex addiction is like other addictions, or is it just a more dramatic way of describing someone who is an undiscerning slag. Is the ‘gateway’ drug, for example, wanting to hold someone’s hand, then at some point finding yourself sucking multiple cocks in a car park in Rhyl?

My first husband apparently suffered from this, erm, affliction. Perhaps he honestly believed that I was the one to cure him of his multi-orifice habit? It took me a few years to understand that’s like believing a gambler when they tell you that they’re only playing one roulette table in Vegas: they will be spaffing their wad multiple times, praying that the next spin will be the one time the house does not win.

The house always wins.

Confession time: I have flattened a fuck of a lot of grass in my time. There are crop circles round the UK where my arse has been. And you thought they were created by aliens. Sorry to ruin that conspiracy theory. I’ve even taken part in an orgy or two. I didn’t enjoy it. Turns out I’m a terrible multi-tasker; I can only focus on one set of genitals at a time.

Darling reader, this is where self-reflection comes in handy. You attract what you give out. My first husband, and others, thought that was the essence of who I was. I put so much emphasis on sex – and I was really good at it – this is how I appeared on the outside. I’m sure that con-man Freud would have plenty to say about zee absent farter und vanting zee menz approval. There is some truth in this pattern of behaviour, but we can only blame our parents for so long. If you spend your life ‘freuding’ yourself, you will eventually become a cliché.

And nobody wants to be a cliché, darling.

Ours was the archetypal tornadoesque romance; all cross-eyed sweat and crisp white sheets. From the outside, it probably did resemble a natural disaster. It’s occurred to me that men, and some women, have fallen in love with me (or what I portray) very quickly. If this sounds like I’m bragging, I can assure you I’m not. It’s been a hell of an unhealthy journey. Whatever felt good, however temporary, I fell into without thinking of the consequences.

Maybe I was also an addict?

My first husband proposed after only a few months, when we were on holiday in St Lucia (where we got married a couple of years later). I knew that he wrote in a diary, because I’d glimpsed it lying flat, spine upwards, on the bedside table. Did I read it? Of course I did. This was the man I was going to be spending the rest of my life with. He wrote that he’d noticed another woman (someone we’d had drinks with at the bar) and that it made him wonder. Then, in the next sentence he wrote that at last he had found me, “the one”, and he could stop wondering.

That diary, spine upwards on the bedside table, was just the tip of the dick. I mean iceberg.

In 1999, my doubts bubbled to the surface and we broke up for a while. I went on a tour of East Africa singing Rogers and Hammerstein’s A Grand Night for Singing. It was such an amazing job. He found the hotel I was staying at in Zanzibar, and sent a fax with a big cartoon dog drawn on it. It said ‘I miss you’.

By fuck, he knew which buttons to press.

After we were married in St Lucia, we lived in Brighton. I was miserable; and brunette. The uncertainty had taken the light from my hair and eyes. I knew it too. But it’s like being in the middle of a maze and not knowing how to find a way out. Or wanting to.

Pure Shores is one of the tracks that takes me back to what should have been a romantic time frolicking on golden sands, but turned out to be a pebbly, syringe-littered beach, with a greasy chip van parked in the middle.

We got divorced in 2002 after just over a year of marriage. I was properly fucked up. I wrote to my father, who had effectively cut off contact from me and my sister in 1998. I needed a man’s perspective. No reply came back. I had become the girl with the absent father cliché writ large.

Convincing myself I hated men, I dabbled on the shores of lesbos, but I couldn’t ever fully commit because like a London cab driver, I wouldn’t go south of the River (Thames for those not au fait with the London cabbie’s mantra).

My cold, monosyllabic divorce lawyer suggested I get evidence of my husband’s ‘extra curricular activities’, so on a blisteringly hot July day, I drove to Brighton with my good friend Duncan. We were like two cops on a drugs raid; I even did a silent ‘cover me’ gesture, my fingers making a pretend gun as we entered the flat. I was pretty sure my husband wasn’t home but we didn’t know for sure. I felt queasy. I remember at one point wondering if I could stay married and do the polyamorous, swinging thing. Jesus, it’s awful what we’ll convince ourselves of when the threat of being alone looms. But the truth is there is really nowhere more lonely or sad than a toxic relationship.

We discovered a lot more in his office, including a black briefcase full of contact magazines (the pre-internet way of finding like-minded, swinging folk) and very explicit photos of the woman he was fucking. She was a mutual colleague who had once stayed in my mother’s house. The photos taken in the bedroom included one of a giant teddy bear lolling in the background. My husband had given me the teddy for my birthday.

Poor old teddy, I thought, having to see her unkempt 70s muff, tiny tits, and incredibly bony arse.

After we divorced, they got married, had two children and then he did the same to her with a woman called Karen. Karen. I shit you not. Darling reader, that’s what’s known as a very lucky escape.

And a kind of karma, of course.

Told you I had a talent for pulling out of nosedives.

That was the year I started writing songs with my friend Duncan.

MORE TRACKS TO COME…