Groom blues

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote in these pages about how - after a messy and painful divorce from my Italian ex-wife that resulted in me being homeless and reduced to sleeping in Elizabeth Hurley's nanny's bunk bed - I fell madly in love with Dr Vanessa Neumann, a New York academic otherwise known as the 'Cracker from Caracas'. Although we had known each other socially during my first marriage, the fireworks didn't start until we found ourselves at a birthday dinner party at Annabel's last October given by a mutual close friend.

During that fateful evening, I found myself at the bar with Vanessa after dinner and fell in love over a shared dish of bitter chocolate ice cream. After dancing, I leaned over to Vanessa and said: 'I can see myself marrying somebody like you.'

We were engaged three months later on New Year's Day and we were married on 6 June at Kensington Town Hall, with a larger church service the following day in the Palace of Westminster, followed by two weeks in Capri, Positano and the Sicilian island of Panarea. All blissfully romantic --but what about the reality, six months on and the credit crunch wreaking havoc with my marital plan of us living between a bachelor flat in Holland Park that I bought at the very top of the market (October 2007); a family country house in Shrop-shire that Vanessa and I were meant to have moved into by the summer; and Vanessa's Upper East Side apartment in New York. It all sounds great, doesn't it? In January, we went to a dinner at The Dorchester for Boris Johnson where Vanessa sat next to a London socialite who asked where we would be living as a married couple. After she told him about our various homes, he replied: 'Holland Park, Shropshire and Park Avenue - quite the cosmopolitan couple.'

That was the idea at least. Along with having twins, writing a bestselling thriller, importing wild boar to roam around my wood and peacocks around the garden, flooding our medieval moat, learning to cook, paying off my astronomical credit card bill, and building an extension to our London flat. Looking back over the first six months of my marriage - which have coincided exactly with the credit crunch - I am reminded of Mike Tyson's line that 'everybody has a plan, till they get punched in the face'.

Apparently I am far from being the only newlywed whose marital plans have been badly derailed by events. According to new research from California compiled by San Francisco-based psychologist Dr Michelle Gannon, expectations are so unrealistically high these days that before any couple can start to enjoy married life, they now have to go through another obstacle - the bridal blues. Apparently, this afflicts new brides worse than grooms, with as many as ten per cent of newly married 21st-century couples (there are roughly 275,000 new brides every year) having to seek counselling as they suffer remorse, sadness, or frustration at their new circumstances - in particular their lack of freedom and independence.

The trouble with this theory, however, is that any evidence of bridal blues in my wife's case has little to do with such psychobabble, rather being entirely down to a series of spectacularly bad decisions on my part - in particular bad financial management - that would test the patience of any 21st-century bride, or one from any other epoch for that matter. Ask any alpha-male trader or fund manager who depends on being in the 'zone' to perform well; when your confidence or judgement goes, it can make you depressed. After a series of spectacularly bad calls that cost me tens of thousands of pounds - such as driving my BMW 740 around without coolant in it, despite the red warning light, until it blew up on the M40, or choosing to gut both my London flat and country house, sending in two teams of expensive builders at the same time without having a proper budget in place - I went to see my doctor, saying I didn't trust my own judgement any more. My decisions were becoming increasingly irrational and self-destructive. What had gone wrong? I had a beautiful, smart wife, whom I loved madly, and Spear Media, the wealth management publishing house that I founded five years ago, was prospering with new editions around the world. How could I be suffering from the groom blues?

As a result, our London marital home has been falling in value from the day I bought it for £800,000 after a sealed bidding war. More than a year on, our London project remains a work-in-progress - no blinds, no curtains (the flat is on the ground floor so people peer in from the street), no rugs or carpet, half-painted bookcases, an unfinished study, a TV that doesn't work in the bedroom, and - my particular bête noire - secondary double-glazing that doesn't fit the huge windows properly. In one week, a ceiling fell down and my Irish builder managed to fall through the floor into a neighbours' basement flat while they were watching TV.

So far, I have probably spent about £100,000 on the flat and it is still far from finished. I still owe my Irish builder thousands of pounds. He's being very patient, but the fact that the flat has turned into a money pit - and has slumped in value - has definitely taken away from the pleasures of living in Holland Park. Although the property crash is hardly my fault, I feel an idiot for succumbing to property fever. 'It's unacceptable to get married and not have a proper place to live,' a whisky mogul friend told me flatly the other day at lunch.

Vanessa's first words on going downstairs to the dungeon-like bedroom were: 'This flat is great for parties but where will the children sleep?' We have permission to add an extension on the back for a new master bedroom but the chances of finding the £75K necessary to build it are remote. Still, Vanessa (one of the reasons why I love her so much) always remains upbeat, saying things like, 'A friend of mine got married and couldn't afford to move to a bigger house so they kept the baby in a drawer of a desk for the first few months.' The problem with the ill-fitting double-glazing sums up many of the issues I have been having. To beat the credit crunch, the way I sourced our builders and suppliers (from the TV aerial guy to the chimney sweep) was to write down the telephone numbers on vans I spotted that supplied services we needed. The more beaten up the van, I reckoned, the cheaper the service would be.

This method worked fine until my double-glazing fitter supplied us with windows that were placed eight inches below the original sashes, looking terrible. They are apparently being fixed next week, but that will cost me another £850. In the country, the situation has been even worse. As with London, the first thing I did was to get the builders to gut the entire property. Instead of renovating room by room, I thought the best thing was to rip out the old electrics, put in four new bathrooms and an entire new central heating system. Worse, while all this destruction was going on, some fragments of a medieval wall painting showed up in part of the house, so all work had to be stopped suddenly while we consulted with experts. This was the equivalent of funding an expensive movie on location, and having to pay the entire crew every day while the star lies in bed with flu. Several months ago, I had to lay off the builders after I ran out of money. A lonely cement mixer now stands by the back of the house.