Jeffrey Archer reveals the secret of a happy marriage Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare says there is a reason why the seaside town where he was brought up recorded the second highest number of divorces last year after Birmingham. Anyone who has worked in Weston-super-Mare - as I once did on the pier, as a cleaner - will tell you that we used to have more people coming from Birmingham for their holidays than any other town. The locals got accustomed to the Brummie accent. I assume that a lot of the divorces are accounted for by people from Birmingham, who, after failling in love with the town during their holidays, subsequently decided to settle there. There were 2,437 applications for divorce petitions in Weston-super-Mare in the 12 months to September 2012, compared with 2,799 in Birmingham, which is ten times its size. While the best-selling novelist loves Weston-super-Mare - there was no question of him taking the name of any other town when he was made a peer - he concedes that its divorce rate can't wholly be thought of as an imported problem from Birmingham. I guess people who have made their money and move there, often in retirement, find they are suddenly spending every day in the company of their other halves. That often causes problems. He said the secret of his 47-year marriage to his wife Mary was that they both got on with their own careers and were not always in close proximity. "And so, when we do see each other, we always have something new to say," he says. That's a great help.