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19 November, 2010
So Kate and William are to marry. We learn of this the day after The Guardian splash features the Government search for the answer to what makes us happy. I spoke recently about this at the Battle of Ideas, in a session on spirituality and well-being.


It seems absurd to imagine that happiness can be defined or measured. It is such a subjective thing. Much of my life has been spent chasing illusory happiness, in the name of instant gratification, through serving addictions of various kinds although thank God never hard drugs, else I fear I would not be here to tell this tale. Many of my friends and family assumed that my three marriages were part of this sad quest, or certainly the first two. But that is not the case. They were part of my quest to have children, and I remember with great pain the prejudice I encountered from husbands, their friends and families that as a working woman, I was assumed not to want children, even though this desire had been stated frequently. Each divorce came about for this reason and indeed, if I was a Catholic, both my first two marriages could be annulled as neither was capable of producing a child. I am happy now, married for the third time and with one son although I would have liked more. Many of my generation were sold, or as in my case had thrust upon them the feminist 'dream', an illusion of having it all that has cost some the terrible price of having any children at all. I crept in under the wire, just before the cut-off point. But until now, when I have looked back on my first marriages and the terrible trauma of those desperate arguments, the pleadings for children, I have felt nothing but remembered shame and despair. Because of this, I threw away all but one picture from the first, and have attempted to divorce myself from many memories of the second. Those marriages cost me so much, and the least of it was the money.

 

This picture from that first wedding is one of the most beautiful ever taken of me. But the not so much underlying as overlying sadness shows. I am fatter and older now and with wrinklier skin but goodness, I would rather be all those things and more than return to my miserably married younger days. The photographer, Colin, was incidentally one of the first people in Britain to die of Aids.

This week, the character of those miserable marriage memories changed. How did this happen? Because of Kate and Will of course. Suddenly, from being an excessive extravaganze replete with potential embarrassment and humiliation, a big wedding has become fashionable. I am resolve to resurrect my one saved, but beautiful, picture from my first wedding and post it on my website. Instead of living in the pain of broken dreams, I can remember the hope with which those relationships began. I can take some responsibility for my part in the problems, for I must have played a part in it, even if by subconsciously choosing men who were unable to create a family, at least not with me. It is impossible not to get caught up in the hope for the future of these two beautiful young people, a prince and princess, destined to become the repository of so many dreams. How I want and pray for their marriage to succeed.



Diana was such a big part of my life for so many years. Every time there was a marital crisis, I had to write a piece for The Times on the constitutional implications. At one point, she issued a statement at 6pm about the latest development in the separation crisis, and we had 12 people waiting outside our flat in Battersea for dinner. This was a time when journalists had mobiles but few others, and the office called me when I was in the car on Tower Bridge. I turned round and went back to work to spend several hours looking at the implications of the latest Diana tragedy, while our guests languished outside, eventually giving up and going home. There was no way at all to contact them. Our neighbours were out. I write 'our', but I actually cannot remember whether I had a husband at that time or not. Years later, when Diana died, I was out of the country, in the US, at a dance championship. We all wore black armbands but the competition went ahead. With a little boy who is now nine, I can hardly bear to think about the effect of what happened on those two boys. This announcement about the wedding is so glorious, almost as if it represents a kind of healing, in so many ways.

'Popular sentiment from the Old Testament downwards has never failed to pay its tribute to the devotion of mothers, but only a few women observers, so far as I know, have called attention to the steadily increasing strain on their resources and endurance caused by the rising standard of educational and social requirements.'

Eleanor Rathbone, The Disinherited Family, 1924



June 2010
When it rained last week and our coach canceled the tennis lesson, I took it as a sign from heaven and went to Westfield instead to buy an iPad. It is an object worthy of reverence. It is light, beautiful, seductive and fills a need I never knew I had. But it is feels fragile also, like so much of this new technology that surrounds us. As I took delivery at the clean, white Apple store in west London I couldn't help thinking of Moses taking down the Commandments on the tablets of stone at Sinai. I hope I never drop my iPad but am not convinced it will survive if I do. The iPad is replaceable. The commandments are not. I remember sitting in my father's little Georgian church in Gratwich, week after week as a child, and reading the carvings in stone on the wall and in particular the words: 'Thou shalt not kill.' In the wake of the Lake District shootings, is it heresy to suggest that if the commandments were inscribed on the wall of every classroom in the Judeo-Christian world, there might be less violence, less sin? it could never happen, you say. But I think it would be easier to achieve that than ban guns. Change must always start from within.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

Alberto Giacometti