Fox (n): carnivore of genus vulpes; crafty person; scavenger; (vb) to confuse; -ed (adj): to be drunk.
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Tuesday 14 August 2012

The best revenge is to live well.

LIFE, as has often been said and in defiance of the past fortnight of competitive sport, is not about winning.

You can have millions of pounds, you can have lots of children, you can have a trophy cabinet full of gold medals, but those things mean a lot only to you. To others, more often than not, they are of only passing interest.

As an old song says the race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself. Maybe you'll have a sixty-year marriage and he'll always put the spiders outside for you, but it always ends one way or another and you'll be single at some point.

There's a lot of hot air spouted about how important it is to have a partner, to be one half of a more socially-acceptable unit, which is why news of a famously-unmarried woman is, well, news.

Jennifer Aniston is officially seen as "unlucky in love" and somehow behind on points compared to her ex-husband Brad Pitt and his new life because she has been single, on and off, since 2004.

Hmmm. She's so "unlucky" that she slept with Brad Pitt for seven years - back when he was pretty, before he went all craggy and grew unattractive facial hair.

She's so "unlucky" she went on to have a series of love affairs with some of the world's best-looking male specimens, including Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Paul Sculfor and Gerard Butler.

Brad sleeps with just the one woman, whose leg is on wrong.


Jennifer has no children and can have lie-ins and late nights. Brad has six, one of whom inexplicably had to be born in a remote part of Namibia because Mrs Bonkers insisted on it.

Jennifer is so blighted by misfortune that at the age of 43 she looks like a 20-something. Brad, who is 48, looks like a 48-year-old man who doesn't get a lot of lie-ins.


In the years since their public and painful split Jennifer has built a personal fortune of £70million. Even films she was in which were trashed by critics do very well financially, like The Bounty Hunter, which had a £25m budget and earned a total of £86.6m. She is extremely successful and she usually appears on red carpets by herself, on her own merit.

Brad and Mrs Bonkers are together a lot richer, but according to those who compile lists on these things each has earned less in recent years than Jennifer. They 'support' each other by always appearing as a duo at events, presumably because she cannot stand unaided with that leg.

Jennifer is now getting married to a long-time friend who also happens to be one of the hottest men on earth. Brad is also, maybe, getting married to Mrs Bonkers.

Now, it's nice to have a companion, someone with whom to share your worries and pool your resources. It's good to know there is someone who will support you when you have a wobble. Despite the fact he fell for her while married to Jennifer which is never the best start, Brad has stuck it out with Mrs Bonkers and good luck to them.

No-one ever wins in a divorce but if you want to tot up who's doing best in the long run then by pretty much every single yardstick Jennifer is ahead. She is wealthy, healthy and successful, she has a romantic history most of us can only daydream about, and more importantly than anything else she smiles a hell of a lot more than either Brad or Mrs Bonkers.

She is well shot of an ex who is scraggy and inconsistent with a fetish for women who like knives and blood and have dislocated their own knee. Having a partner that's worth the noun is a nice thing, but it is not the only way to be happy or successful and frankly if you can't have fun by yourself you need to see a doctor.

Being single does not mean you are half a person, or that you will fall over if someone isn't stood next to you. It means you are one whole individual, happy in themselves, who can stand on their own two feet and in extremis can remove the spiders yourself.

It's far better that someone stands next to you because of that, than because you might collapse otherwise.

If she's been unlucky, then I want some of it.

Cow.