...not want to be divorced: did not want my wife to marry another man: and I did not want to lose the comfortable home I had shared with her--happily as I had thought--for nineteen years. It took several plain-spoken meetings with my solicitor before I was finally persuaded that my marriage was over.

My flat was one of five created by the subdivision of a dark Victorian house which sat four square at the bottom of a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of the town in which I worked. My neighbours were a varied lot: there were Hazel and Dennis, both retired inner-city social workers, whose view of human nature reflected the sheer hellishness they had been exposed to every day of their working lives; Edith Eves, a prim, desiccated little woman in her late fifties, whom I occasionally passed scuttling from the local bus stop to the refuge of her front room; Charles Windrush, a solicitor who, like me, had been ejected from his own house by a heartless wife bent on marrying another man; and my blonde and rouged landlady who lived alone on the ground floor in the largest of the fiats and retained the garden for her own use.

I believe that most men, at the end of a bitter and protracted divorce, welcome the prospect of living alone for a time while they construct a new life for themselves. Charlie Windrush was one of them. He met his most urgent physical needs twice a month by paying a visit to a London "sauna" which he knew: otherwise, he preferred to be on his own. I was not like that at all. I am what used to be called "the marrying kind". I like the state of matrimony. I wanted to marry again. It did not take me long to discover that this was easier said than done. The ways men and women meet each other when they're twenty-one do not apply when you're forty-six. It is not a matter of the goalposts having been shifted by the years: the truth is that it's an entirely different game.

Fortunately, I did not need to be told that the nightclubs of my youth--in fact the places where I first met my wife when we were students did not cater for single, middle-aged men. I spared myself the embarrassment of learning this at first hand. But my attempts to meet single ladies in...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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