Chapter 8 — Boredom and Dating Again

After the Christmas break and the holiday to Africa, life fell to being as dull as ever. I was no longer working, and the days simply drifted by without any purpose. Even recreational activities such as golf were insipid acts, and I couldn’t seem to become motivated. I suppose the lack of employment and the associating lack of industry by oneself was the primary factor in becoming melancholy, but I had no financial need to work, and I even dreaded the idea of returning to teaching and having a hundred screaming brats around me. With such a lack of resolution, life trundled on.

It was six months since Anna had passed away, and the kids, although never coming to terms with the loss of their mum, somehow seemed to manage much better than I. I do think that the younger you are, the stronger you are to grief. A teenager appears to deal with the immediacy and aftermath of death, and their lives become rocked into a routine, or at least that appeared to be the case with Alex. But what effect the trauma has in years to come is another matter. Rebecca and Danny, too, fell to moving on, and the dogs and cat were the same as ever, oblivious that anything in the house had changed at all.

I’d been finished with Lorraine for a month or so, and apart from the odd meeting with Bernie, didn’t have any social life at all. It suddenly became apparent that the happy life spent with Anna, and having the family with us and next door with Rebecca and Danny, meant that we neither wanted nor strove for a network of friends to share occasions with. However, in the winter of that year, I would have died for such a group of friends I could socialise with, but many of my old friends had long since been lost, and strangely, I often thought about the Doctor at that time, and I did search on the internet and on Facebook for him, but without any success.

I thought about going on holiday again, but I knew that wouldn’t have been a good idea with my state of mind. Melancholy with the monotony drove in, and I would wake around the hour of five, take the dogs out, and by seven in the morning, I was bored, incredibly bored.

I still had a dormant account with the dating site, and decided to return there, as a means of escaping the house and the interminable silence emanating there.

***

Diane was wonderful for me; she was happy, laughing, charming, sophisticated, wise, and loving. She had one of those characters which seemed to attract every type of happiness, and she loved life, too, and it was impossible not to feel that warmth she had for living. She was gay in the old-fashioned sense of the word and beautiful, too, with it.

Life suddenly began to assume more purpose, and I’d often thought about the idea of selling up property and moving away from the house, but somehow my being always seemed to either resist the idea or sneak away from it. But this new vigour I had made me think clearly about my present situation.

John, my bricklayer friend, had two ideas: the first being to buy this disused RNLI boat and sail around the coast of Norway, pirate fishing for cod and bringing them back to England to sell. Bearing in mind, neither of us had ever sailed a boat before, didn’t have a clue about how angry and unforgiving the North Sea in wildest winter can be, the idea never got off the ground, or on the water, but, I believe, it’s still alive, though, in John’s head somewhere.

The second idea was good, though, and this started to become a reality. After the financial crash of 2008, land became much more affordable to buy. What would have commanded such a ridiculous price in the past was now within purchasing means. Banks had ceased to lend out money for the purchase of land, and the price of it subsequently dropped. John and I had the ability to build a house, sell it, and move on. We would buy a big static caravan for all the dogs and cats whilst the house was being built. We didn’t mind living like that, as it wasn’t any different to how we’d lived in the distant past when playing chess.

Alex welcomed the idea, and he always had the option of staying with Rebecca and Danny if he needed a break. Rebecca and Danny wanted a flat, and since Anna’s death, they, too, had lost any desire to stay in their house any longer, and welcomed the idea for all of us to move on, as it were.

Diane and I had now been together a good month or so, and she was also in favour of the development idea, and she helped out with all the planning, costing, and finding a good piece of land to purchase and start the project. I embarked on decorating the house ready to sell, and life suddenly began to have purpose again.

And then a phone call; that’s all that can change one’s life irrevocably.