Fern Britton has opened up about the heartbreak she experienced when her marriage to Phil Vickery ended. The former This Morning presenter, who met Phil on the set of Ready Steady Cook, confessed that she didn't expect their relationship to end the way it did.
Fern and Phil married in 2000, but after 20 years together announced they were going their separate ways. It left Fern, then 63, to "run away" to the former couple's holiday home in Cornwall.
Mum-of-four Fern says remembers the house being “welcoming” when she first pulled up after leaving Phil. She found the home a offered a "hug of security" and a "sense of peace".
In her autobiography, The Older I get, Fern writes: “There were so many happy memories around every corner. The children dashing in with sandy feet, surfboards piled up outside the front door.
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GETTY)"The empty packets of crisps and tins of Coke strewn around bedrooms, kitchen and lounge. Happy bronzed and freckled faces of children who were bickering but carefree," reports the Express.
However, despite the comfort the house provided, Fern couldn't help but feel disappointed that her second marriage had ended just like her first one to TV executive Clive Jones. She admitted that while she hoped her relationship with Phil would last "until death do us part," it had unfortunately faded over time.
She went on to say: "And now, here I was, single, looking at a very different future to the one I had imagined. This was not how it was meant to be.
"I had always thought that my husband and I would make it our permanent home. A place to share, together, once the children had left school. Now a new chapter was starting and for the first time in my life I couldn’t be sure of what my future held."
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(Image: GETTY))Fern confessed that this wasn't the "first time" she felt like she needed to rebuild her life. She reflected on her career transition from TV presenter to fiction writer, as well as her previous marriage. The 67-year-old admitted to feeling a "profound sense of failure" after her relationship ended.
She added: "This wasn’t my first experience of rebuilding a life: I’d already been through two marriages, two divorces, two careers – one as a television presenter/journalist, one as a fiction writer. But I could do it all over again."
Since parting ways with Phil, Fern has kept her personal life away from public scrutiny. Despite being in her sixties, Fern shows no signs of slowing down, having appeared on Celebrity Big Brother last year. Since becoming a novelist in 2011, she has written nine books.
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