Chapter 1: Being Lonely is a Bitch

Being lonely is a bitch. My divorce had been final for over a year now, and I was sick of microwaved meals and fast-food take-aways. I hated waking up in the morning on my own in my large bed and I especially hated sitting in front of the TV and bitching about the politicians with no one to listen or even to argue with me. I wouldn't admit this to just anyone, you understand, but I was also tired of relieving my sexual frustration into a piece of toilet paper.

Isn't it amazing, you start out with the bubble of magic when you are young and meet someone that you think you will spend your life loving and adoring, and via some strange process the relationship loses any joy. I met my wife-to-be just before I finished school and we got married soon after I finished. We did all the normal things; got a house with a mortgage; had the regulation two kids; did the nine-to-five thing to put bread on the table and then it was suddenly all over.

On that day, my wife simply handed me some papers and told me that it was over. She had met someone else and she wanted a divorce so that she could start a new life. Our two daughters were out of our hair, they were both over twenty-five now, and she had had enough.

It really shocked me to the core. I had been comfortably in a rut and this was the very last thing that I had expected. I hadn't thought that there was anything actually wrong with our relationship, although it wasn't really exciting to me anymore either. Once I got over the shock, and realised that there was no way I could salvage anything, the process moved very quickly and we had our divorce within two months.

During this period I was forced to re-evaluate everything about where I was and what I was doing with my life. We were very comfortable financially, and the divorce didn't really hurt me there, but while it was in process I decided that seeing as my personal life was going to be changing so radically, I should maybe re-evaluate my professional life at the same time. I took a long hard look at the business that I had started with two partners soon after school, and realised that I was just spinning my wheels there anyway. I wasn't really needed for the day-to-day running of the business, so I arranged to move myself out of the office completely, in essence becoming nothing more than a silent partner. My drawings every month were probably about triple what the average higher-income wage-slave would make. My about-to-be ex-wife was hooking up with someone who was also pretty well off and so she would make no demands on me. Both my daughters were sorted out with trust funds that would keep them very comfortable until they had settled in their careers.

So I semi-retired. I pottered around at home for a month or two until I got totally bored, and then decided that I really needed to do something with my time. I had bought a piece of land fairly near my house that I had been sitting on for a while, and while I was in this state of flux, I got a notification from the local municipality authorities that the by-laws had been changed and it was now permitted to develop the land for 'cluster-housing' which it hadn't been before.