Hey ho. If ever you’re feeling a bit down and fed up with life, an infallible way to cheer yourself up is to contemplate the misfortunes of some once-ravishing, now slightly-past-her-bloom celebrity who’s having a thoroughly nasty time. Or so I find — and so, evidently, does the Daily Mail, which this week ran a two-page piece about Ulrika Jonsson and the break-up of her marriage to Lance Gerrard-Wright, her husband of two years and the father of her youngest child, Martha.

Not, mind you, that the rupture comes as much of a surprise — at any rate to Hello! readers, or to the audience of the BBC children’s programme What Kids Really Think, to whom Ulrika recently confided a) that it would be nice not to have to work, and that if she ever married again it would be to a millionaire; and b) that “the best thing about being married is having someone who puts the rubbish out.”

Oddly enough, putting the rubbish out is the thing that has always bothered me most about being single. Not that it’s bothered me enough to get me up the aisle, but I do have a tendency to follow my son around the house with a tape-measure, urging him to hurry up and grow, because the instant he’s taller than me I intend passing over to him the hateful Monday-morning ritual of lugging my own bodyweight in bags of newsprint and cans of Whiskas through the house at daybreak while clad in a nightie and a pair of wellington boots (the nightie, I hasten to add, is a personal foible. Alexander is welcome to wear whatever he fancies while doing the lugging, just so long as he does it).

Two things struck me about Ulrika’s incautious remarks to Hello! and the Beeb. One was the intense weariness she evidently felt with the married state that we singletons tend, in our wistful dreams, to imagine as so blissfully comfortable. And the other was a passionate longing for it all to stop for a bit. For someone — the millionaire husband of her fantasies — to come along and make the drudgery of raising three children while simultaneously earning enough money to keep the show on the road just go away.

“Ulrika is fed up with having always to rely on herself,” said the Mail. “She dreams of being free to pursue an art course or write novels.” Oh dear. Don’t we all? Indeed, modern women’s fiction deals with little else but the impossible conundrum of trying to combine family life with personal fulfilment.

It is no consolation to Ulrika, or anyone else contemplating the wreck of hopefulness that is the end of a marriage, but the confusion of longings — the fundamental contradiction between our parallel human desires to be free and to be looked after — is a conflict very much of the moment. Yesterday a report, published by the Institute for Public Policy Research, found that the number of single-person households has risen from 18 to 29 per cent since 1971, and predicted that by 2021 more than a third of the population — 35 per cent — will be living alone.

Which would be fine, if we were all happy about it. But of course we are not. Women, according to the report, find solitude easier to bear than men do, largely because it frees them from the drudgery of domestic life (though let’s not forget the dreadful binbag squatting in the corner, patiently waiting to be taken out, like some smelly old dog).

What is strange, though, is the way in which family life has evolved from being a matter of sexual politics, as it was in our parents’ generation, to become a matter of conflicting individualties. “I’m too old to be with my parents, too single to be with a partner, too private to share with a mate,” said one man interviewed for the report. All that privacy and still lonely? Hey, I think I feel a novel coming on. Except, of course, it won ’t be a very good novel, on account of the fact that you have to have had some formative experiences — other than those of living alone in a very tidy flat — to write fiction.

In short, then, we all want company and solitude, children and careers, individual fulfilment and unending love, and we all want it now, at once.

And if it goes wrong, we’re out in an instant. Is this a sign of social decadence? Maybe. Or perhaps the nature of human attachment remains just as the dramatist John Webster saw it, 400 years ago: “like a summer birdcage . . . the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair, for fear they shall never get out.”

Saddle sore

I’ve always been slightly contemptuous of intelligent women who succumb to the blandishments of lifestyle gurus. Cherie and Carole, Madonna and the kabbalah, and all the odd bits of dodgy kit — hostile ray-deflecting pendants and bits of red string around the wrist — that their newfound spirituality seems to involve.

But the instant you start to sneer, you can be sure that your comeuppance is on the way. And so it is with me. Earlier in the year, my bad-tempered Irish mare and I found a new teacher, a young eventer who was going to sort out our jumping problem. Except that it turns out not to be a jumping problem so much as a life problem. So far, the Rebuilding of my Seat has involved six weeks of riding about bareback.

Lately I have got the saddle back — but not the stirrups or the reins, without which I must make my way down a jumping lane, with my hands on my head like a naughty schoolchild. Last week I was told to jump with my eyes shut. Did I argue? Indeed I did not. Dissent would ruin the magic.

A bit later, I described to an horsey friend the thrilling trust and spirituality of the seat-rebuilding process. There was a pause, then, “Jane,” said my old field-master buddy, pityingly, “E’s ’avin’ a larff.”

Cherie and Madonna must get this all the time. But if it works, who cares?

Fright night

It’s Hallowe’en — and here comes that traditional embellishment of the occasion, the batty Bishop. This year the role is filled by the Bishop of Bolton, who reckons that Hallowe’en should be reclaimed by Christians and renamed Lite-Nite, a celebration for children with quizzes and games — ignoring, with glorious ecclesiastical silliness, the fact that the occasion is already a Christian festival. An odd and troubling festival, it is true. But if you can’t think of anything more inspiring with which to oppose the forces of darkness than an illiterately named quiz night, I’m afraid they are already upon you.

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