My friend Debbie says getting divorced is like finding yourself washed up on the world’s ugliest beach. Every aspect of your life becomes the shell of something so distasteful you wonder why God ever let it exist.

Debbie works in a recycling plant. Her job is to remove the wrong kind of waste from the conveyor. Everybody is still confused about what you can recycle. Once, last autumn, amongst the boxes and tins, she found a bag of puppies.

“What sort of sick bastard puts dead puppies out for recycling?” I asked.

“I never said they were dead.”, she replied.