My experience in Milton Keynes was long behind me. Now Icould afford to pay for the very highest-class escorts. After all, what was thepoint in sitting in these expensive restaurants and hotels like someBilly-no-mates? Consequently, I always made sure that I arranged a suitablecompanion for the evening.
These were classy, elegant, well-dressed girls who looked amillion dollars. I made sure I looked the part, too. On one of my first visitsto London I had found a suit in an upmarket store that fitted me as well as ifit were tailor-made.
With a shirt and tie plus new shoes to go with it, not tomention an extremely expensive watch, I walked around oozing class and wealth.To get by in London, you didn’t just need to have money, you needed to show youhad it. Walking around looking the part, I found that few doors were closed tome.
Some of the hotels found it a little odd when I paid for therooms in cash, but no questions were ever asked.
After a few visits I had my routine off to a T. Go to thetrack, stash the cash, and take a taxi straight into London, arranging my“date” for the night on the way. I’d head straight for the store where it waseasy to get myself kitted out – I knew where everything was so just bought the samethings straight off the peg every time.
I must have bought that suit 50 times over. It was theultimate in repeat business for the store. Usually by 5pm I’d be safelyensconced in some luxury suite somewhere looking forward to an evening of thebest pleasures money could buy.
My indulgences grew and grew. Sometimes I’d order two girlstogether and then we’d really have a party. Aged 50 and acting like a playboy,some might have looked at me and seen a man having a mid-life crisis.
I preferred to see it more as a young man sowing his wildoats and getting it all out of his system before marriage and parenthoodbeckoned. I already had Stacey with me during the holidays, and it wouldn’t betoo much longer until she was back with me full-time. Then I would “grow up”and become a responsible adult.
Even now, it wasn’t debauched champagne orgies all the time.If Stacey was at home, often I’d go into London after the races and buy themost luxurious delicacies I could find and take them home to Oxford for theevening. So we dined on everything from Beluga caviar to Wagyu steak.
One time I even brought home a 7kg Ibérico ham I had seenhanging in the food hall at Harrods. It cost over £2,000 and was the mostdelicious thing I had ever tasted.
It was in booze where I really excelled. I found an antiquewine dealer in London and frequently brought home a bottle that had cost meover £10,000. As with the suit, it was often the same one. There were onlyabout twenty of these bottles left in the world, apparently, but I must havedrunk that particular one at least that number of times myself.
Stacey had no idea of the value of the wine she wasenthusiastically glugging down beside me. To have told her would only haveraised awkward questions. Officially I was well off, but not that well off.
So that was my life in 2021, a carefree paradise where Icould have whatever I wanted. I enjoyed it tremendously for several months, butin the end it began to lose its appeal. For all my fun and games, and despitethe fact that I had Stacey, I felt lonely and as if my life lacked direction.
As 2021 gave way to 2020 there were changes on the horizonthat I hoped would remedy that.
Work
October 2020
My big “Five-O” was approaching, a landmark birthday. Formany, this marked the turning point from the last gasp of youth into middleage. I was more than happy to be going the other way, having seen somesignificant improvements in my appearance over the past couple of years.
Despite still being fat, my hair was growing quiteencouragingly. The bald patch in the middle was noticeably smaller and therewere some welcome flecks of black appearing amongst the grey.
I had a few minor health niggles that I was hoping would disappearas time went by. My eyesight without my glasses was abysmal so I went intoSpecsavers to try and find out more about my optical history. I was pleased todiscover that I’d only had to start wearing glasses in my mid-forties.
My teeth weren’t in particularly good shape and I’d lost twoof my rear molars in the past year. One of these caused me no end ofaggravation at the time. I had to go to the dentist three days running onemergency appointments to have the same tooth removed, such was my pain onawaking each morning with the rotten tooth in my mouth.
It was all very well drinking the same expensive bottle ofwine several times, but repeating the dentist experience was something I couldhave done without. On the third day I stuck a quid under the pillow before Iwent to bed, figuring I must be in debt to the tooth fairy.
It was gone in the morning, but the tooth was back. She musthave waved her magic wand, because the pain had thankfully subsided enough onthat fourth morning for me to cope with it.
My birthday was on the 21st of October and it coincided withanother milestone event, my retirement from the retailer I had been with forover 25 years. Since leaving, I had been out for a drink with Nick a couple oftimes, which had enabled me to find out more about my past career.
We had both started in the mid-1990s working in a flagshipsuperstore outside Oxford. I had been a supervisor in-store, whilst he was amanager in the warehouse. We’d worked our way up together, gaining jobs at HeadOffice early in the new millennium and
