A splice for life

It's honestly not a case of never say never. I, Sylvanus, have treaded my way through the divorce maze and... come out the other side untroubled and - what's more important - unhitched. So it can be done, and legally.

Oh yes, my friends, divorce - that contentious hot potato that divides opinion on this little islet - is already legal here. You don't believe me? Well I've just proved that it is possible to cut yourself adrift from the trouble and strife... even after 15 bloody years of marital misery and all-engulfing embarrassment.

How? Simple... just convert to Islam. Then all you have to do is face Mecca, it's left hand down of the post box on the corner of Main Street, say three times: "I divorce thee". And you're free.

Believe me, having to prostrate myself on my prayer mat five times a day is a small price to pay and eminently preferable to spending the rest of my life with a superannuated slapper with halitosis and the temperament of a fractious rhino, a creature to which the old bag also bears more than a passing physical resemblance, incidentally.

But if you don't fancy growing a beard and walking around in white pyjamas with a tea towel on your head, how can you cut the ties that bind?

Tricky. The problem of whether to legalise or outlaw divorce is as old as the British monarchy. In fact it was an English king, Henry VIII, who actually invented divorce. He was getting the usual hard time from one of his ill-chosen scrubbers... in this case I believe it was Catherine the Arrogant, memorably nicknamed the Flanders mayor (yes, she had local government aspirations, in other words she was meddling in things that should not have concerned her ugly little head)... when the poor old king in exasperation said to one of his courtiers, something to the effect of: "Will nobody rid me of this meddlesome piece?"

So Sir Thomas More... or it may have been Thomas à Becket... decided to help his monarch out of the manure and promptly invented divorce. And that is all true... every word of it. And if you don't believe me you can look it up in the Encyclopaedia Trivialita.

But all that doesn't help you if you happen to live in sunny Malta attached to some limpet-like harridan with the temperament of a fractious wildebeest.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. My cousin Walter wanted out some years back. After 12 years' hard-marriage he'd had enough and therefore he decided to apply for the next best thing to actual divorce (some might say it's even better than divorce) - he applied for an annulment of his marriage on the grounds of non-consummation of his marriage.

Now you may think that dear old Wally had a bit of a nerve applying for an annulment on the grounds of non-consummation, when he and the dragon had between them been responsible for seven kids, including a set of twins. But Wally isn't stupid. He knew that he had a trump card up his sleeve that would both grant him his annulment and still recognise him as a father of seven. And you know very well what that trump card was, don't you?

Absolutely correct... money. Walter is... sorry was, absolutely loaded. So all he had to do was flash a great deal of cash in the faces of the powers-that-be and welcome back to the wonderful world of bachelor-hood Wal.

So, you see, divorce is not impossible, even here in medieval Malta. All you need is a very large bank balance and even more chutzpah. Like my dear old nannu - and he was married five times - used to tell me: "I'd never support the call for legalised divorce. If you want out my boy... there's always a way... if you've got enough of the folding stuff."

How true.