Another story, a little on the long side so make sure you're comfortable.
Sorry no explicit sex.
Sorry no wives get burnt at the stake.
Sorry, the guy acts a bit wimpy from time to time, but it all works out in the end.
If any of this doesn't appeal to you, then please pass on to another story.
Please vote and please comment --- I love it!
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Times had been good ----- but now they weren't so!
Life can be like that some times.
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Becky and I had been married seven years, though the significance of that treacherous number escaped me at the time.
The early years had been all summer and wine, both having good jobs, great prospects and plenty of spare income. The second year we had taken out a mortgage to buy our own house, but by the sixth year my lovely wife Becky, ever upwardly mobile, had pushed us into an even bigger, better, and of course more expensive one.
A four bed-roomed detached executive house, on a pretty exclusive development on the edge of town, with a double garage, upscale kitchen and wonder of wonders, a designer conservatory---- in oak ----- no less.
It was lovely and in fairness, I liked it a lot.
But Becky, she drooled over it when she first saw it, and didn't let up till we mortgaged ourselves to the hilt to procure it.
It was her dream.
No problem ---- we had the income to cover it, though the 95% loan we took out eat up a huge proportion of our money at the time.
But we were riding the wave like so many others, and who in those heady days of the first decade of the new century, could imagine that property prices would do anything but spiral even higher and higher.
We couldn't go wrong --- The house on it's own would make us both wealthy, as prices went up and up --- well they did that all the time ----- didn't they?
Everyone knew ---- There was no risk involved!
Then came Northern Rock, the first British bank to run into problems, rapidly followed by the whole lot of them.
The Royal Bank of Scotland should have been allowed to go broke such was the mountain of badly negotiated debt that it was left holding, and even in America, with Fanny May and the rest .......?
International financial melt down!
Problems for them meant problems for us, especially when one of those very banks started to lay off staff, and Becky became one of the nameless thousands.
No job, no income, and in those bleak days of 2008, no prospect of finding an early solution.
I still had my job, but even we found ourselves struggling, and as hard as Becky tried, and she really did, there was just no similar work to be found.
Problem!
We survived for about two months without so much as changing our lifestyle, out credit cards, one by one, maxing out, and our overdraft facility running up to it's limit.
Silly ---- Stupid ---- Foolish!
Yes I know.
Yes of course we were all of those thing, but after the carefree days that we had grown up in, we simply didn't see it coming.
Oh for the wisdom of our parents who had lived through both good times and bad.
Oh for the old head on young shoulders.
Foreclosure!
Last warning from the Building Society that if we didn't start to pay off our debts and get our loan back in order, then they would re-posses our beloved house.
Becky cried and I couldn't console her.
She blamed herself for losing her job, and no matter how much I tried to persuade her otherwise, she started to get more and more despondent.
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It was Angie, her best friend, who got Becky back on track, though the manner of her doing it left me a little apprehensive.
"If you can't get a job with your brain girlfriend," she told my wife one evening right there in front of me. "Do what I did and use your looks instead."
Well, perhaps I should explain!
Angie had been made redundant a few months before Becky, when the Insurance company she had been working for in middle management, that catchphrase that covered so many things, went belly up.
Like Becky, she'd found nothing available, and had soon offered herself up to the bars in the area to see if they had anything to offer.
One look at Angie and ...... A stunningly pretty girls balanced beautifully on the most gorgeous pair of long slender legs that one could imagine. Let's say that she soon found work behind a bar in the centre of town, and I don't doubt that the bar's weekly takings suffered not one jot as a result of her arrival.
Angie was single, or at least divorced from her ex husband Nigel, who had left her the rented apartment they had shared when he went off to Dubai, so it was enough for her to get by.
That rhymes --- sorry, it really wasn't meant to.
Nigel had actually been my best friend at University, and .............
Look! Hang on there!
I'm getting ahead of myself aren't I?
Let's go back a few years shall we?
Let's go back a whole twelve years or more!
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Nigel and I, my name's Dick by the way, arrived back at Loughborough University for our final year, confident that we would be qualified Civil Engineers by the end of it.
We hadn't exactly been the most studious of students, but we did enough, had scraped through all the exams, and had basically tried to screw every female student that passed within range of us. And not only students, the girls from the local town were also much fancied, and at least as far as Nigel was concerned, one of the lecturer's wives had featured on his list.
It was Fresher's week, when the new intake of students arrived a week before the general return, in order for them to find their feet a little, and to see what the university had to offer. The second, third and fourth year students didn't come back till the following week, unless of course you were involved in one of the clubs or sports and volunteered to come back early to initiate some of the newcomers.
Nigel and I always volunteered.
We were very good at initiating the newcomers.
Remember that an awful lot of them would be of the female species.
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The Fresher's ball!
A wonderful institution where the first year students had a big dance up at the Union, to allow them to get to know one another.
Worked for us.
It was like a menu of all the new talent, or as it used to be referred to ----- 'The cattle Market'.
That year we scouted around the Union Bar, and then prowled the dance hall spotting talent. There was lots of it, but experience had taught Nigel and I, not to jump in at the first opportunity. We were after all finalist, had a car between us that first years weren't allowed, and in our overblown opinion of ourselves, thought we had the God given right to pick up the very prettiest girls.
Strangely, quite a lot of the girls seemed to agree with us, and we flitted from group to group, promising to return.
Then we saw them, dancing there together.
Two little angels, both eighteen, sweet and lovely, fresh out of school, and a prettier pair you never did see.
