Firstly, it’s never easy when your world is suddenly turned upside down and you are shat on from a great height. Like Ronnie, whose long relationship with Liz is currently teetering on the brink. When it happens, and it will sometime happen, you can look on it either as a challenge or a defeat, ‘though it’ll just seem defeat for a long long time. I don’t know Liz, except by the mostly complementary things that Ron has said about her over the years, but I get the impression of a kind, fun, conscientious lady who likes buying from catalogues. Oh, and cats (not buying from cats, but liking cats). Which makes it harder to understand why she has left the cats, catalogues and Ron behind. Moved out, gone to live in suitcase land with a friend, Caroline. There’s someone else involved, of course, there always is, who has created the same chaos in his own house as currently exists in Ron’s. But that’s what we do; in the end material things, comfort, pets don’t cut much when for whatever reason we cut loose. Midlife crisis? Too easy. Out of love? Stifled? Mental case? Probably. We’re all mental cases, looking around for judgments, satisfaction, some purpose when we feel that life is slipping by. I blame work; without it the tensions just don’t appear. As couples we spent too much time apart. Then again, sometimes we spend too much time together! Of course Liz’s ‘new’ man works with her, as does her friend. Whatever they have shared they share as workers, but now she enters a world where she can’t get away from the everyday. It’s there with her friends, her co-workers as they sit round the TV in the alien environment they have created for themselves.
I feel for them.