I know what becomes of the broken-hearted

Cat Stevens wrote a song in the 1960s, "The First Cut Is The Deepest", a hit for PP Arnold. If you're reading this, Cat, let me tell you that you got it wrong, wrong, wrong. The First Cut is The Slightest would have made a better lyric. Certainly a more truthful one. Oh yeah, adolescents fall in love, and it all goes horribly wrong, and it hurts. But not for long. Like hangovers, they get over it, and quickly.

Cat Stevens wrote a song in the 1960s, "The First Cut Is The Deepest", a hit for PP Arnold. If you're reading this, Cat, let me tell you that you got it wrong, wrong, wrong. The First Cut is The Slightest would have made a better lyric. Certainly a more truthful one. Oh yeah, adolescents fall in love, and it all goes horribly wrong, and it hurts. But not for long. Like hangovers, they get over it, and quickly.

But when you're in your late forties, hangovers and broken hearts hurt like hell. And the pain never stops. The last cut hurts more than a 20-year-old singer/songwriter could ever imagine.

When a middle-aged man finds himself at the end of a broken romance, he acts in a way that would embarrass any lovelorn adolescent. He cries. He lies around, refusing to eat, or wash, or go out. He sits by the phone waiting for her to call and say she made a terrible mistake, she was wrong about everything, can they please get back together again, now?

Needless to say, it never happens. Instead, he gets a letter saying that it's "really important that we can be apart so we can grow as individuals", and he thinks: "No, what's really important is that we get together and I smash you in the face with a polo mallet."

He loses all his friends because they can't bear his relentless misery any longer. He sits in bars and bores complete strangers with interminable stories about what she said and what she did and what she looks like naked. They, if they get the chance to speak at all, console him with helpful phrases such as, "snap out of it". He smokes and drinks until 3am, and then decides to ring her, hanging-up as soon as she answers. (Of course, she knows it was him.)

He goes to places she's likely to be, then is thrown into heart-lurching panic when he sees her slim, beautiful body from behind, walking arm-in-arm with another man. Oh, God! Then she turns and she's fat and 50 and somebody else, but it's too late now, the adrenaline has coursed through his system, he's shaking, and the rest of his day is shot to hell. But he can spend it walking in a world full of lovers, usually younger, sometimes older (and that makes it worse), holding hands, kissing, laughing, in love. And all he can do is look at them with sick, unending loathing and wish either he or they were dead. And this is two years after they finished.

Slowly, however, the pain fades, leaving him changed, forever. He looks at women in a new way. Once they were sex objects, mere meat, bodies for him to ogle and have unspeakable thoughts about, but now he shies away from them as you would a mad dog.

Women are not just from Venus. Women are from a planet so alien and distant as to be totally beyond comprehension. And they're dangerous. For the first time ever, a homosexual lifestyle begins to have appeal. Or celibacy. Anything other than wilfully engaging in a relationship with someone who will hurt and destroy him. Someone who is secure in the knowledge that she can do this simply because her sexual organs are different and accommodating.

Show me any 20-year-old prepared to go through any of the above. When their love-life goes horribly wrong, all they're prepared to commit themselves to is sulking and growing an extra spot. Maybe, to make themselves feel better, they might rifle through their parents records until they find a copy of "The First Cut Is The Deepest". Mine's in the bin.

When I want to wallow in somebody else's recorded misery, there's only one song I want to listen to. It was a hit for Jimmy Ruffin and asked the question, "What becomes of the broken-hearted?" The answer is simple: they live alone with no-one to talk to, no one to hug, and nothing to console them other than the thought that finally they know where the bread-knife is.