Why am I so unlucky in love?

00:00 05:49

Petronella Wyatt has narrated this article for you to listen to.

One of my exes is trying to get me arrested. I discovered this when I received an email from the Met Police saying that he had accused me of stealing his belongings. As he is not a British citizen, the nice policeman I spoke to said I need do nothing in response. I was puzzled, until I remembered that after we had parted ways my ex had said: ‘I’d like to see you behind bars.’ I hadn’t realised he had meant it literally. The bastard.

I wondered what I had seen in him, apart from his looking like a lovesick Satan. I have consistently willed myself to accommodate men whose teeth I should have knocked out. There was my former beau Henry (not his real name, of course). Henry was not an intoxicating mental cinema but had a certain androgynous allure and a house in Dorset shrouded in sea mists. He was obsessed with anything to do with war and employed an ex-serviceman as a cook. The man was an ill-tempered halfwit, who ignored my tentative menu suggestions, saying: ‘Would Moddam like me to prepare a roast swan?’ Moddam, whose mouth used to distend with fear in his presence, would have liked that very much compared with what he did prepare.

On one occasion, guests were presented with red-and-white spheres resembling suppurating boils. ‘Is this parrot?’ asked Dougie Hayward, the 1960s couturier who swung with Terence Stamp and Richard Burton. Then there was Henry’s fetish for military uniforms. He had a cellar full of dummies clad in the damn things. After he commissioned a Hussar uniform for my Christmas present, I discharged myself from further service.