I have just learned that one of my dearest friends is dying of cancer. She has been ill for over three years and we all thought it was a tropical disease that she had picked up in Peru or China. However, after losing weight continuously and being subjected to a whole battery of tests  - at intervals of weeks or months - she has now been given only months to live. I cannot believe that doctors could be so incompetent in not discovering the problem before . . . .

Anyway, it led to an attempted 'truce' in the shakey 'menage a trois' life I lead when I took the Bear's hand (I'm refering to my husband as the Bear because he can be cuddly at times but more often than not he is in a bad mood - typical Bear with a sore head!) and suggested we ought to try to make the most of the time we have left together. If I was hoping for an affectionate response, it was not to be as he immediately went on the offensive about the Whale (my ex., who is helpless and handicapped and being rather heavy reminds one of a beached whale) saying that we couldn't possibly enjoy life while HE was around.

It's useless to point out that it was the Bear himself who begged and pleaded to come to France and 'help' me look after the Whale - that I had left him because he was absolutely unBEARable to live with and because he had made my childrens' lives a misery so that they had moved out and gone to live with their dad as soon as they were teenagers.

It was for this reason that my son was stuck at home looking after his dad instead of making a life for himself. After nearly two years as a fulltime carer he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I had to do something.

Despite walking out on the Bear on various occasions I had always gone back, tail between legs, because there was nowhere to run to.

This time, it was all going to be planned, and it took nearly a year but that's another episode . . .