Sharia law rules in the Cotswolds! (Thanks to a male, middle-aged British judge)

IF YOU’RE married, the chances are that, at some point, you’ve fantasised, if only for a fleeting second, about your beloved other half dying in a car crash. Oops – I didn’t mean that! What I meant is, of course, that you will have at some time wondered, idly or otherwise, about divorce. What would it be like Out There? Will I be awfully lonely and tradge on my own? And above all, what about the poor, poor children?

But I bet you’ve never wondered whether you will be allowed to FASHION Week Special. Have you seen those awful jeans that are everywhere? Denims that have been shredded to reveal great expanses of leg through gashes in the fabric? Online I found a boyfriend pair from Levi’s made of something called ‘repurposed denim’ that were more gap than material, as if jeanz meanz holes, and they cost almost £1,000. RIP rip-off ripped jeans. They’re silly – and chilly. It’s not fab, it’s Feb. divorce or not. Therefore like you, I reeled backwards to hear of Tini Owens, 65, who was refused permission to divorce her 78-year-old husband Hugh after 39 long years of marriage on the grounds she couldn’t prove their marriage was over.

It sounded Victorian. No, it sounded more than archaic; it sounded barbaric. Almost sharia.

But it’s true. Breaking up is very hard to do in this country.

You can’t just decide to part ways, and then have a cool divorce party to celebrate your conscious uncoupling. You have to prove that your marriage has broken down by choosing one of the following reasons: adultery (which is quaintly defined, by the way, as ‘intercourse with a person of the opposite sex’); unreasonable behaviour; desertion; or prolonged separation.

In the case of Owens v Owens, the wife’s chosen grounds were unreasonable behaviour, but the husband contested the divorce.

So breaking up was even harder and it all went to court, where proceedings took a turn as old-fashioned and outdated as the law’s current definition of adultery.

The judge ignored the fact that the wife’s desperation to end the marriage was, in and of itself, the clincher that the union was over.

Instead, Judge Robin Tolson QC, ruled that the wife couldn’t divorce her husband, a mushroom magnate, because all the 27 grounds she listed in her petition were trifling little niggles, even though they’d lived apart (in adjoining golden stoned farmhouses in Broadway, Worcestershire) since 2015.

There was a row in an airport (indeed – I don’t think I’ve never not had a row in an airport); they had a silent pub meal (ditto); and he’d made ‘stinging remarks’ at dinner (haven’t we all?).

TOLSON dismissed the conjugal misery rapsheet as ‘scraping the barrel’. Her hubby was ‘old school’ while Mrs Owens was, he ruled with no doubt an imperious thwack of the gavel, ‘more sensitive than most wives’. Case dismissed. Just think about this for a second. If, heaven forfend, you too were stuck in a stale marriage – well, tough. Nobody promised you a rose garden, and if your other half – like Hugh Owens – wanted to keep you tethered like some broken brood mare until he was ready to send you to the glue factory – well, with the help of a middle-aged male judge, he jolly well could.

As Mr Owens successfully argued, he and his wife should stay together in old age ‘to enjoy 30-odd years of shared experiences’ – a chill prospect that Mrs Owens’ lawyers said left her no better than a ‘locked in wife’.

A locked in wife. In England, in 2017.

This is so primitive, and so mad, that the Appeal Court judges who heard this case last week must overturn Tolson’s decision of last year, and go further: they should make clear in doing so that Owens v Owens is a landmark case.

Then the law must be changed so that couples who want to divorce no longer have to drag each other through the mud, and wash their dirty linen in public, or even in court.

We must have no-fault divorce, and fast.

Otherwise, think of poor Mrs Owens. There will be a corner of the Cotswolds that will be forever Saudi.