Apologies for recent absence from the blogosphere, but I think I have a decent excuse. (It’s been quite a week for excuses: on Thursday I had to e-mail a Brazilian friend that I would not be able to meet her at the weekend because a volcano had erupted in Iceland, quite a tall order to put into Portuguese if one doesn’t really speak it.)
I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was undergoing a period of homelessness, without giving details. These can now be provided: just before Christmas my wife decided to end the marriage in spectacular fashion. I shouldn’t perhaps be giving people ideas, but it is well for my male readers to be warned; if a dissatisfied female partner can contrive a vaguely plausible accusation of assault, you are in big trouble.
The Old Bill were called, and duly put the cuffs on me for a nineteen-hour sojourn in the cells. This was the first night of the ferocious weather conditions which we all remember from last Christmas, and the cell was far too cold to permit sleep. Next day, in a state of zombification, I was interviewed, charged, and told I would need to find a bail address because I would not be allowed home for the foreseeable future. This being 20th December, I was more or less compelled to fall back on my mother, with whom I spent a perfectly pleasant Christmas.
But a man pushing fifty cannot really be expected to set up home in his mother’s spare bedroom. Besides, my mother lives 160 miles away. I don’t actually have a job requiring daily attendance, but I’d love to know what happens to those who do when the Old Bill bar them from their homes. As I blogged in early February, I spent the early part of 2010 lurching from pillar to post in a somewhat battered Saab. My wife, had she really been living in terror of me, had a married sister living in the same town; but of course she, as the innocent party, could not be expected to inconvenience herself by moving out of the house.
“As the innocent party”? When the case finally came to trial, last Wednesday, it was decided by a court of law that the innocent party was in fact myself. The prosecution case imploded spectacularly. It did not seem to have occurred to the lady that it might be a good idea to play the poor, oppressed innocent abroad, and to save the Medusa impression for another occasion. When the magistrates retired to consider their verdict, the prosecuting counsel was called into their chamber and emerged looking as if he had been given six of the best. I rather fear he had been given a royal dressing-down for bringing such a shambolic case into court.
Let’s face it: the real charge against me was possession of a Y chromosome. I could be locked up for nineteen hours and barred from my home for two months, having committed no crime, purely on account of my gender. When the police summary of the case was read out in court, I noticed that I had been referred to by my surname only; my wife, who has a different surname, was given a respectful “Ms.” They clearly “knew” who was the guilty man.
The excuse for this is “compensation” for the tendency of the police of an earlier era to ignore “domestics”, thus leaving women without protection from husbands’ or lovers’ violence. I understand, but fail to see why I should be made to pay that compensation. I entirely agree that male violence against women is a serious and despicable crime; but let’s save our anger for those who have actually committed it, eh? We don’t yet acknowledge crimes so serious that they are exempt from the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. I am afraid that the restoration of gender equality will require a bit of a backlash. I will be returning to this theme in the next few days.
Yes, I was entirely vindicated in court, but that is not enough. Can I now sue for the return of four months of my life? Anyway, now to the divorce courts. Heigh-ho. They’re always fair, aren’t they?
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