Knee Deep in Knightsbridge. The book of the hit-blog.KNEEDEEPINKNIGHTSBRIDGE

The FMC’s lawyer, BM, arrived unexpectedly one Tuesday morning. I was told he was staying two nights, as they had important and urgent work to do. Fine. Nothing odd about that, or so I thought. But that evening, when they got home, they both looked exhausted. Stressed out. The FMC was staring at the floor and not smiling at all. BM always looks worried, but he looked particularly bleak.

It was half past four. My son had just got home from school with Jane, his nanny, and I had sat with him while he had something to eat, then carried a cup of tea up to my office on the third floor. I had only just walked in when my phone rang. It was Paul, the FMC’s accountant, and, in a voice I had never heard him use, he said: ‘I have something very important to tell you.’

He told me what the FMC could not. That he was so disastrously, and so dangerously, in debt, after a two-year secret share-buying spree, that our family home, the business, our whole life, was in mortal jeopardy. It would all have to be sold to pay his colossal £3million of unpaid taxes owed to HMRC. Bailiffs were knocking on his office door every day. Nasty men with crew cuts were coming round, threatening to kneecap him and then go and ‘sort out the missus’.

I made the mistake of bursting out laughing. ‘You must be joking,’ were my very first words. Sadly, it was no joke.

Instead of crying and hiding in a darkened room, I dusted off my long-unused smart wardrobe, put on my high heels and my make-up, and went out to find a buyer for his property company. I am no businesswoman. I have never done a deal in my life, and the notion of holding it all together was terrifying. But my old friend Nathalie, over from LA, took one look at me crying into his skinny latte and within ten minutes had found two people he trusted. His mate A went through the portfolio like a dose of salts and, yes, he was interested, and yes, he would pay a price we were happy with. The FMC wasn’t happy. Not at all. Not at the prospect of selling his life’s work. It was hard to feel much sympathy, when he hadn’t thought about any of that while he was gambling it all away.

A

Our Judge, it is fair to say, was in no mood whatsoever to be trifled with.

The FMC had turned up with a very jolly barrister, hired late on the Friday night, who had a lovely smile and precious little to work with, and, alongside him, an unqualified ‘adviser’ the FMC had picked up from somewhere. He was quite extraordinary looking with long white hair and an air of a Harry Potter villain about him. He began hissing at my Rottweiler before the Judge had even taken her seat. The Judge took one look, enquired briskly who on earth he was supposed to be. She was unpersuaded by the answer, and promptly turned him out of her court. And that, m’learned friends, was the last we saw of him, thank God. Then she got down to business. Was she cross that the FMC had emailed a whining letter about the credit crunch to her personal address? You betcha. Our Judge has balls of steel, and on Monday they came out for their annual outing and let rip.

The highlights, just like the football, only rather closer to real life: when the FMC’s barrister solemnly declared that his client ‘couldn’t walk down Verbier High Street on a thousand pounds a week’, my Rottweiler and I nearly drew blood gripping each other’s hands to stop ourselves howling, I sat there thinking that if the CSA took his passport, he wouldn’t be walking down Verbier High Street on anything at all. A second Judge was brought in to observe proceedings, they really are that gripping, and by five o’clock the poor soul was quietly nodding off, head swaying, jerking awake, and I got the giggles all over again; I took no offence, for our affairs bore the life out of me too. But there was a darkest moment. When our Judge said, plainly, that these ghastly, dragged-out proceedings would have ‘a dreadful effect’ on the way my boy develops, I burst into tears, and could not stop for a good ten minutes. Because she was right. She was completely right. And then, then she turned, put her hands on her hips, looked like she’d swallowed a wasp, and ripped into the Father of My Child exactly as we always knew, in our hearts, that one day somebody finally would.

Child proceedings are private, so I can only tell you this. The judge told the FMC that our son needs two loving parents, not just the one; that our son needs a comfortable home with his mother, and that we are not to be separated. That it was obvious he had considerable means, but that getting true financial information out of him had been all but impossible. She considered him angry and resentful, and found his attitude to our living arrangements unattractive. She was disappointed that he had not bothered to view a single property, and horrified that he had ignored my pleas to stop pouring thousands into Neurexa shares, at least £12 million worth of them, while paying nothing towards his son since October 2007.

And of me? She told the court that I was articulate, and not a little witty. She said she had enjoyed the blog, and wished me well, and would follow its future with interest. She would not be banning it. I was free to carry on writing. Only one line of those four great bound folders of my blog was ever read out in court. Just the one. She was a woman of the world, and was neither much interested nor much shocked. She awarded me half my costs, to be paid within eight weeks. All through this awful saga the FMC had sworn, many times, that he would never be made to pay a penny towards them.

B

Sunday lunch is my favourite meal of the week, and never more so than when it is taken with the finest band of women in London: my fellow survivors.

After a bracing yomp round Hyde Park in the freezing blue wonder of the early morning, I met the girls at a steakhouse on the Fulham Road, there for some fun, some frolics, and, of course, to put the world thoroughly to rights over four Bloody Marys. One of them had just been fired: her boss, having imbibed rather too eagerly on the free champagne, had bellowed ‘You’re fired!’ down the phone from New York, only to send a grovelling letter the next morning offering the job back, having plainly received a major bollocking from his wife. We drafted her reply between us over the cottage pie, she’d go back, she wrote, provided it never happened again, provided she got a firm Christmas bonus, and, oh, an extra two days’ holiday a year. Atta girl. Another’s soon-to-be-ex is out in Iraq doing his bit for our lads, which I take my hat off to; she’s a touch miffed he took the full body armour with him, having rather hoped for a spot of sniper action. Naughty girl.

And there we were, the four of us, intelligent, hard-working mothers, all of us ex-wives or ex-girlfriends of one stripe or another, all of us needing and wanting to work whenever the children would let us. And that, somewhere around the second Bloody Mary, was when the idea hit me.

It may have been the Rioja. It may have been the festive spirit. But by pudding we had founded, in principle, a business, and I still say it would have made us a fortune.

Divorcees On Their Knees, we called it. Fed up, gentlemen, with picking up useless women in bars, women who are marvellous in the sack but come with no household skills whatsoever? Finding Miss Right could take a lifetime; in the meantime, let us step into the void. We bring our own shoes. Between the four of us we have fifty-two years of married life, and we are looking for flexible part-time work in central London, anything legal considered; we are not too proud to get down and do the dirty. We can clean your floors from twelve pounds an hour, mind your children from fourteen, and organise your entire life from twenty-five, everything from ironing your shirts to buying, wrapping and delivering the Christmas presents for the special people you keep forgetting. Press releases from thirty. Legal services from a hundred and twenty, specialising in medical and marital matters. Build or renovate your house from two-fifty a day. World domination, rates on application.

C

We wanted, you see, to target the bachelors and the men living alone, because a commitment-phobe with no wife and no live-in girlfriend is going to need us most of all, and what commitment-phobe wouldn’t happily pay? We do everything a wife would do, and then leave at the end of the day with money in our pockets.

My goodness, we laughed. We really did. And laughing, with three good women and a bottle of red on a freezing Sunday, is a business I would go into any day of the week.

When the CSA letter itself arrived I very nearly framed it. It’s a real jaw-dropper. On second thoughts, before I frame it, I might photocopy it two hundred times and hand it out to passers-by when my son and I go skating at the Natural History Museum this afternoon. ‘Your Child Maintenance Payments. Having looked at this, we’ve worked out that Mr XXX, should pay £0.00 a week. Please remember that even if we’ve worked out that your child maintenance is £0.00, you may still be entitled to some arrears. Because Mr XXX, has a net weekly income of less than £5.00, his weekly rate is nil. Yours sincerely, the Child Support Agency.’

Wow. I just love the line about us maybe, just maybe, being entitled to some arrears, after all these years!

The CSA is as much support as a ten-year-old bra. As much support as a wheelchair with no wheels, and no one to push it. They are a total and absolute disgrace, and that these people are the alleged custodians of our children is not merely frightening, it is terrifying.

I’ve been trawling the reduced bin at the Waitrose on Motcomb Street with my equally skint girlfriend, two ex-wives of very rich men, hunting for tinned carrots and potatoes at eighteen pence a go, minutes from their sell-by date, when who should we bump into one morning but the beauteous Nigella Lawson herself. Naturally, we seized the moment and asked the Domestic Goddess what on earth one is supposed to do with a trolley of about-to-expire root vegetables. And do you know what? Even she was a bit stumped. She wasn’t, if I’m honest, terribly helpful, she suggested shoving the lot into a big tortilla, though I confess I had other ideas about where I’d rather shove them, all involving the Father of My Child’s back passage. Ho, ho, ho.

But we did have a laugh, the three of us, over the bargain bin. She’s a good egg, is Nigella. And there is something rather wonderful, and very levelling, about standing there in your reduced circumstances, comparing notes on eighteen-pence carrots with one of the most glamorous cooks in the country, all of us squinting at the same wilting produce. Recession, it turns out, is the great democratiser. It gets us all, in the end, to the reduced shelf, goddess and grafter alike.

But it is what he gave our son that I shall never quite forgive. My boy unwrapped, barely wrapped, a black stone with an elastic band round it. Neither of us had the faintest idea what it was, until it broke open to reveal a fossil inside; a fossil from Peru, apparently, which seemed fitting somehow. And a games console with no memory stick and no games, not wrapped at all. But the thing that broke my heart clean in two was this: late on Christmas Eve, I found my boy carefully writing out a gift tag, and I asked him who it was for. ‘It’s for me,’ he said, ‘because Daddy forgot.’ How sad is that? A small boy, writing his own name on his own present, so that there would be one under the tree that somebody had remembered. I could have wept. I did weep, later, where he couldn’t see.