She had been paying the rent on a three bedroom place that had once been shared by herself and two friends when they had all been studying, and at over £300 each month, it was a hugely unnecessary financial burden. The risks involved with moving in with a mildly unhinged thirty something soon to be divorcee with a fridge full of Jack Daniels and Pot Noodle were outweighed by the huge savings. Fortunately for me.
It wasn't long before there was proper food in my cupboards and the oven was being used for something other than drying out wet boots. I was extremely gaunt at that time, and pale and Alison set about turning Casper the friendly mess into something that more resembled a healthy human being. We were officially a couple, and it worked amazingly well. There were no real flash points, no clear barriers to harmony in such a small space and the two of us seemed to just slot together like missing pieces of an old jigsaw.
We decorated, pepped up and generally spruced the flat as best we could, and it became far more of a home than it had been for me. We pooled resources and joined forces me and her and when the time eventually came for me to file for divorce, Alison was there to confirm that I had indeed been apart from the ex wife for a period of two years.
It's a requirment, or at least it was then, that two people be apart for 2 years before being able to proceed with a divorce unless one or the other agreed to 'Unreasonable behaviour'. I was offered this fast track split option at the begining but saw no good reason why I should lower myself in such a maner to suit my wife. Unreasonable behaviour? if I had tied her up and beaten her with a wet fish every friday for the last ten years of our marriage I doubt that would have been anywhere close to being as unreasonable as being a secret Lesbian for thirteen years of marriage and then doing a bunk with the genetic proceedes of the fraudulent union in order to secure a comfortable cash injection every month for several years thereafter.
Incidentally, I pay almost £400 a month to my ex wife to support the children. I am paying for pedigree dogs and trips to Iceland to visit frosty lesbians with a taste for raw fish. And they wonder why men dress up as Superman and hang themselves from bridges in protest at the Child Support Agency.
Anyway..I digress..the Decree absolute arrived in due course, and I was a free man. A free man with 45k of debt still hanging around his neck, but a free man none the less. Like BC and AD a new period of my life was begining..I was in to my AD (After Divorce) and it felt good.
There were problems ahead though. I was a divorcee, considered by those of a religious persuasion, a kind of low-life pond feeding God hating Siner. I proposed to Alison just before we left to see in the new year in Paris during the last days of 2006. I intended to do it there, that was the idea, but it proved impossible to secure her ring size without asking her...so I proposed just before. It works better that way, what you lose on surprise and initial impact, you make up for by geting the right ring in the right size.
I had already met my future Brother and Sister in law and their children, before I decided to pop the question to Alison. They had visited not long after we had moved in together and we shared a snowy Christmas with them in Dundee making Snowmen and sizing eachother up.
Religion played a key part in her family, although Alison herself was fortunately immune to it's blinkered siren call, and it was religion that was causing some issues with regards to me being accepted into the family. My future mother in law was not happy with Alison's choice of life partner..I was not acceptable for numerous reasons, but the main one was of course my status as a Divorcee. I never received any attitude from my Brother in law to be or his Wife,although there was to be some mild nudging towards their church later, after I had been accepted..but this was not substantial and was dismissed out of hand by myself after witnessing the madness of a certain Churchman as he sprayed spit and brimstone over his congregation during an attack on the evils of a University education.
It's very hard to try and sell your religion when the man fronting it in your local place of worship is clearly a complete and utter lunatic.
Anyway...Paris in the rain...
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