REVENGE OF THE WRONGED WOMEN – June 23^rd 2005

When lawyer Richard Phillips asked secretary Jenny Amner to pay a £4 cleaning bill after she spilled ketchup on his trousers, she exacted a very public revenge – emailing his petty demand to the entire office. And as all aggrieved females know, there’s nothing like getting your own back…

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hen my husband left me for another woman with whom he’d had a two-year affair, I made one crucial detour en route to the divorce lawyer’s office. To a jeweller friend of mine, where I emptied our joint savings account in return for a £35,000 pair of three-carat diamond earrings.

Clever? No (though other deserted wives might want to bear in mind that jewellery is rarely taken into account in a divorce settlement.) But satisfying? Yes, immensely.

It was Byron who wrote, in his novel Don Juan, the story of the archetypal love-‘em-and-leave-‘em swaggerer, ‘Sweet is revenge – especially to women.’

Like poison, revenge is generally thought of as a female weapon, even though it’s also occasionally wielded by men. But while male retaliation tends to be of the immediate, run-him-through variety, women sit and stew. And plot. And plan.

The anthropological explanation is that since women can’t confront men physically, they have no choice but to devise stratagems to get their own back. When a man walks out on his wife for a large-breasted bimbo, taking his five-figure salary and company car with him, there’s not much a woman can do except cross him off her Christmas card list. And buy diamonds.

Powerlessness is key to the decision to take revenge, and there is nothing like seizing back control in a beautifully-crafted moment of retribution to restore your self-esteem.

I once briefly dated an advertising executive, the kind of man who had white suede sofas and no books in the house – ‘too messy, and the spines don’t match.’ It didn’t take long for me to work out that the relationship wasn’t going anywhere, but just as I sat him down to break the news, he pre-empted me with his own Dear Jane speech – on the grounds that I was a natural blonde. Mocha, apparently, went better with his sheets.

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hat weekend, I went through all the red-top Sunday supplements, carefully cutting out order forms for mattresses, encyclopaedias, stair-lifts, porcelain figurines – anything which he’d consider hideously bad taste. Then I ordered everything to his address, cash on delivery. It didn’t do him any actual harm, but the aggravation factor must have been sky high. No doubt he was boxing up return packages in his ex-minimalist apartment for weeks, and cursing me all the while.

And that’s the key to the peculiar satisfaction revenge affords. It ensures you’re not forgotten; that he can’t just move into his cosy little lovenest with his new floozie without giving you a second thought.

A very dear friend of mine, a brilliant historian, had the tables deftly turned on him by his wife when they separated. He owned some 6,000 weighty tomes in dusty book-jackets, filling shelves from floor to ceiling throughout their house. Just before she left, his wife switched all the dust-jackets around and even now, five years later, he’ll reach for A History of Witchcraft and find himself holding Butler’s Lives of the Saints.

Of course I take his side, and I feel for him, I really do – it’s just that it was so neat, so beautifully tailored to drive him, and only him, potty. It takes a woman’s touch to know how to bring a man down.

But once you’ve had your moment of vengeance, it’s time to let go and move on with your own life. The best revenge, after all, is living well. These days I wake up next to a 6ft 5in, blonde, blue-eyed American philosopher, who’s twenty-one years younger than my ex-husband and trained chef to boot.

Now that really is what I call sweet revenge.