For a woman who got divorced a few days ago, Madonna has been doing a remarkable job of gritting her teeth and ploughing on.

That’s not particularly surprising – years ago Madonna had her brain removed to make space for more bicep and her tear ducts were cemented up because she didn’t weep holy Kabbalah water – so we’ve come to expect steely, robotic reactions to everything from her. However, Madonna has now finally decided to accept her divorce and mention it in public for the very first time.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Madonna has said how sad she is about the divorce, and how grateful she is that her heavy workload can distract her from it. Wow, sadness and gratitude? We’ve seen Swept Away and Body Of Evidence – that’s literally about six more human emotions than we thought Madonna was capable of.

When Madonna married Guy Ritchie almost eight years ago, there was a lot of speculation about why the world’s most famous woman had decided to move to England to live with a man who looks like a potato and can’t decide whether he’s Ray Winstone or Terry Thomas. And all the time it was staring us right in the face.

Madonna married an Englishman because she’s essentially English herself. She rides horses, she speaks in something that she believes is an English accent, she wears vastly inappropriate clothing for her age (see: Loose Women) and – most importantly of all – instead of expressing an emotion, Madonna would rather roll up her feelings into a little black ball and push them down into the pit of her stomach where one day they’ll surge out of control and prompt an act of staggering violence on someone who doesn’t deserve it. It’s the British way.

You can see this fear of emotion in Madonna’s professional output – she’s so lifeless in all of her films that often we have to be reminded that we’re not watching a film about a veiny ventriloquist’s dummy, and the most profoundly emotional thing she could come up with on her most recent album is “tick tock tick tock tick tock” – but at least her recent divorce from Guy Richie has yanked some feeling out of her.

Last week, after their divorce was finalised, you’ll remember that Guy Ritchie reacted by smiling and looking pleased while Madonna gave everyone the finger like a surly teenager would. But, of course, in reality Madonna is as raw and vulnerable as you’d expect her to be in this situation – all the posturing and aggressive defiance was just to paper over the cracks in Madonna’s broken heart. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

In an interview with the Associated Press, she says her intense schedule “provides a distraction that keeps me going,” adding, “I’m sad about my personal life, but I feel very blessed and very lucky that I have the opportunity to do what I do in my professional life. It would be horrible if I was just thinking about getting a divorce and had nothing to do.”

Look, we never said they were very big cracks, OK?

But now that Madonna has finally decided to allow herself to properly reflect on the divorce in a healthy and emotionally naked way, maybe she open herself to the remaining stages of being a 50-year-old recent divorcee, too.

For instance, first Madonna is bound to feel some resentment, then loneliness, then slowly she’ll come to terms with her loss. And then finally she’ll get shitfaced in a pikey disco in a small provincial town and end up wanking a frightened 18-year-old off in a toilet. That, too, is the British way.

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