LIZ JONES’S DIARY

IWAS INTRIGUED by a headline the other day: ‘After a bruising year, the kindness of strangers made our wedding unforgettable.’

When you go through tough times, you assume everyone else is enjoying a lovely life. I’m always thinking this. I will be in a hotel lobby or at the airport, and I look at all the other people, who seem so happy and smiley, confident, affluent, accompanied as they are by a partner or a child or a friend, and think, ‘Why isn’t my life like that?’ Or I will drive through a village and see lights on and a chimney smoking and think, ‘Why aren’t I safe and cosy like that?’ And so that headline, about a bruising year, made me click on the story: at last, someone who might have had almost as bad a year as me!

It turned out the bruising year was had by one half of a gay couple: when the law on same-sex marriage was passed in Australia, he felt ‘relieved and bruised and exhausted’. He decided to get married and asked online for used wedding paraphernalia. ‘In less than 24 hours, complete strangers were offering to bake us 60 rainbow cupcakes for free, others wrote about the bunting and floor cushions left over from their own weddings that we could use. Notification after notification rolled in…’

That sounds a bloody amazing year, if you ask me. All I get from the internet is death threats and abuse. After I lost my home, a friend’s PA sent me some cat food. And that was it. You’ve got a husband! Your wedding guests are probably still knitting you throws and spending time planting stuff in your garden. The woman who gave a reading at my wedding was vile about me on Twitter!

I have also lost my best friend. After I wrote in this column about her behaviour at Christmas – not putting a log on the fire or a plate in the dishwasher – I heard through a mutual friend she was not best pleased, and we have since stopped even texting. This was someone I used to see three, four times a week. Even though I hadn’t named her, she was livid.

You can see here a pattern emerging. No one ever feels guilty for their own bad behaviour – cheating on me with a work experience person with a low forehead, or threatening to break the bath I installed in their bathroom so they could make me buy a better one with the insurance money, or not picking up more shopping over Christmas when we ran out of food, or not bringing wine when you don’t drink