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SARAH VINE: A letter to the wife of a VERY dim cheat

By Sarah Vine for the Daily Mail

Published: 19:35 EST, 30 June 2015 | Updated: 06:33 EST, 1 July 2015

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Dear Betrayed Yummy Mummy

First, let me say how sorry I am that your husband has let you down like this.

Travelling by minicab to some ‘random, scuzzy’ address in order to cheat on you with an escort girl is despicable.

No wonder you’re struggling to understand — as you wrote in your anguished online plea for advice — why he would ‘jeopardise his marriage, home and full-time access to his two gorgeous babies for some stupid sexual thing.’

The anonymous woman posted on Yummy Mummy website NappyValleyNet.com about her marital woes

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It’s hard to decide what’s more idiotic: the infidelity, or the fact that he charged his sordid journey to an account with the taxi booking firm Uber, which then efficiently emailed a receipt you were able to confront him with.

Perhaps he was just too lazy to swing by the cashpoint before trashing your marriage vows.

Or maybe there’s another explanation. Men, as we know, can struggle to express their feelings.

Have you considered the possibility that secretly he wanted you to find out? That it was all an, admittedly foolish, cry for attention?

You mention that you have two children under two. I remember what that’s like. Up to your ears in potty training and pureed beetroot. Never-ending piles of washing. No time for adult conversation or, heaven forbid, adult activities.

You and your husband used to be soul mates. Now he’s playing second fiddle to a couple of noisy, incontinent midgets.

The notion that babies help cement a marriage is old-fashioned drivel — in my experience they often have the opposite effect.

As you admit, ‘we have sex less often since the birth of our babies’ — although you also stress that your relationship was ‘affectionate and intimate’. So you might have thought he would understand. Try to set aside his own needs for a while, put you and the children first.

But he’s a man. And men aren’t terribly good at that sort of thing.

I’m afraid you should also be prepared for the fact that this may not be the first time he’s done this — merely the first time he’s been caught (as one of your many online advisers put it: ‘My gut instinct from reading this is that it’s likely he’s done more’).

Even so, all is not lost. Because if he really was a serially devious you-know-what, he would not have allowed himself to be caught out in this way. I’d say, in fact, that his incompetence is a point in his favour: it shows that he’s almost as rubbish at misbehaving as he is at being a good husband.

In any case, it’s better to know now than, say, in ten years’ time, that your marriage has problems. Because with a bit of luck and work from you both, you can still fix things.

You say in your final post on NappyValleyNet.com — a forum used by some of London’s wealthiest mothers — that it is ‘not fair to deny our children their dad because he couldn’t keep his **** in his pants’.

So you are clearly an intelligent woman who wants her marriage to succeed. And you are right.

If the basic foundations of your relationship are sound, it’s not worth tearing down the walls because of a crack in the plaster.

The big question is this: is he just a sleazy pig who likes visiting hookers, or is he basically a good man who’s made a mistake?

If he’s the latter the best thing is to chalk it up to experience and move on. Before you know it you’ll both be 70, sipping cocktails in your back garden, watching your grandchildren play (and your own children arguing with their spouses) — and sharing a knowing look and a laugh.

Meanwhile, he owes you, big time. I hear Anya Hindmarch has an excellent handbag sale on.

Yours, Sarah

Alexa Chung wearing her designer wellies while attending last weekend's Glastonbury gig

Glasto's as sad as Top Gear

As well as being extremely inconvenient for the inhabitants of East Somerset, Glastonbury has become almost as much of a cliche as Christmas.

The build-up now seems to start somewhere around mid-March, and judging by the detritus left behind, the clean-up is going to take a few weeks.

Add to that the fact that the line-up seems to consist mostly of elderly has-beens doing bad dad dancing (The Who), trust fund anarchists and a seemingly endless selection of models in designer wellies (Alexa Chung, right), and it’s a wonder anyone pays any attention at all, let alone afford it the kind of back-to-back coverage it gets on the BBC.

Fact is, like Top Gear, Glastonbury is several years past its sell-by date.

Time to move on.

Never argue with a food evangelist.

I learnt my lesson this weekend when, halfway through a Caesar salad at one of those overpriced organic farm shop cafes, my husband let out a squawk.

Poking its head up through the leaves was a fair to medium-sized slug.

I pointed this out to the manager, who whisked the offending mollusc out of sight of other customers, returning shortly afterwards to . . .

Well, not exactly apologise, as one might have expected. More to inform us that the slug in question was, having come from sustainable renewable organic etc sources, entirely pesticide-free.

I was about to point out that it was, nevertheless, a slug, something not generally considered acceptable in food establishments, when my husband put his hand gently on my knee in a ‘please don’t make a fuss’ sort of a way.

We ordered the bill and left. They charged us for the salad. But not, mercifully, for the slug.

Timelapse shows festival-goers gathering at Glastonbury

Labour MP Simon Danczuk and his wife Karen, pictured, have announced that they have split up

MP's lucky escape

I see Mr and Mrs Danczuk have finally called it a day.

He, the Labour MP for Rochdale, has declared himself ‘devastated’.

She meanwhile, seems to be doing just fine, skipping about in her trademark skimpy outfits, smartphone never far out of sight.

Of course, one can never know the true dynamics of someone else’s marriage (or divorce).

But if you ask me Mr Danczuk has made a lucky escape.

Maybe now he can get on with finding himself a less narcissistic wife who might actually want to be with him because of who he is, not the opportunity for self-promotion he represents.

Why is Lauren Laverne, a 37-year-old blonde best known for hosting BBC coverage of Glastonbury, being drafted in to co-host R4’s Woman’s Hour over the summer?

Doubtless some edict from above about diversifying audiences.

But isn’t the whole point of Woman’s Hour that a bunch of grumpy women like me — who aren’t as young, slim and beautiful as we used to be — get to sit around a table with Jenni Murray and have a good old moan?

Next thing you know they’ll be installing a webcam and getting Cara Delevingne to present it wearing just a thong.

Why does Cynthia Nixon look as if she dressed in the dark while attending the gay pride march

A little pride please, ladies

Why do all the blokes taking part in gay pride look fabulous, while the women seem to go out of their way to look terrible?

Witness Cynthia Nixon — aka Sex And The City’s Miranda — who looked like she got dressed in the dark.

What would Carrie Bradshaw say?

Parts of London ground to a halt yesterday, as the police, aided by volunteers, simulated a terrorist attack, similar to the one in Tunisia.

If the video clips are anything to go by, I’d say we need to radically re-think our strategy.

As far as I could tell, the crack response consisted of a bit of standing around while some dreadful ham pretending to have a leg injury howled like a cat giving birth to a hippo.

Aside from the fact that there is something inherently crass about re-enacting an atrocity that is barely days old, if the purpose of these amateur dramatics was to reassure the general public of their safety, it failed utterly.

Sports day for our son yesterday, and my husband’s turn to support the small person.

Afterwards, the phone rings.

‘How did it go?’ I ask. His reply?

‘Well, as the vicar said to me after the fathers’ race: those who are the first shall be the last, and those who are last shall be the first.’

Oh dear.

A question to the young men of ISIS who see themselves as lions fighting for a brave and just cause.

How manly is it, exactly, to shoot an unarmed woman in a bikini?