How a simple accident claimed my newfound marital happiness

So Christmas and New Year celebrations have been and gone and we find ourselves in yet another year. I'm not usually one for New Year resolutions; I find them too crude, too publicly inspired to be of any real personal significance. Yet this year was different.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I resolved to defy my cynic's disposition and use the arbitrary symbols of the calendar to enact some watershed resolve. What I did not count on however, is the cruel and senseless setbacks that accidents claim.

It was the first day of the new year. I was returning home with my wife and twin girls after a Christmas break in Cornwall. Walking through the front door, I proudly held between my fingers the present I had given my wife for Christmas: a beautiful emerald green Moroccan salad bowl inlaid with a fine black marine-themed pattern.

After a long and difficult year of marital strains, the bowl represented my single greatest triumph. Unusually for my wife, who takes pride in expressing dissatisfaction at practically everything I do, she loved it. It worked well as a symbol too: a kind of hopeful vessel for all our optimism about the new year, free of all the troubles we had endured during the previous 12 months.

But then it happened. At just the moment I was about to enter the house, a little distracted perhaps by my expectant and hopeful reverie, I felt myself hurtling groundwards, the bowl arcing nightmarishly from my grasp. Yes, I had stumbled on the tripwire of fate.

At least that was the way I saw it. My wife, rather predictably saw things completely differently. "You fool. You fool. You blasted fool!" She bellowed at such a volume I expect that you, wherever you are in Britain, have already heard it.

"The one thing you've given me that I really, really love. The first thing that's not a toolset or widescreen for you to watch football and you break it. I cannot believe it." More than a little tearful now, she then uttered those timeless and humiliating words, "I can't cope with this I'm going to my parents' house".

I remonstrated with her, determined not to let a random accident claim the positive atmosphere we had, against-the-odds, managed to foster over Christmas.

"I'll mend it." I said unconvincingly, as I began to gather innumerable shards of ceramic, wondering how on earth they could ever have combined to form a bowl.

"No you won't," she countered. "You've already shown yourself to be heavy-handed enough today. I'll do it."

So that was that. For the next six hours she sat at the kitchen table with tearful concentration, reassembling the single object on which I had pinned all my hopes for a happy 2008.

It pained me to watch her. As if the mere act of breaking the bowl wasn't portentous enough, I suddenly realised that the blouse she was wearing bore precisely the same colours as the shattered bowl. It was like I had not only broken the bowl, but also broken her. The portents and symbols just seemed to be piling inexorably up.

She then took a very calculated break from her dextrous reassembly and fixed on me through damp eyes, "It was not an accident. It is your fault. This would never have happened if you had bothered to relay the path." I immediately realised I was about to smoke my first cigarette in three years.

Now it is three days later, the bowl has recovered surprisingly well. At a distance of three or four metres you would hardly notice it has suffered severe trauma. All credit to her, she has done a much better job than I would have, if only I could get her to sort out that path.

Fortunately, the divorce lawyers have not been called in. The accident though is still claiming its toll. She is very sensitive and at least as dissatisfied as I have known her to be. I also know that for the next twelve months I will have to watch my step more than ever.

It is her birthday in April and I look forward to buying her something indestructible. Maybe she would like a toolset again this year.

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