“Well, we were due a break,” Andrew tells me once the front door closes. “After the disaster of the Jackson contract, it’ll be good to get something that we might actually complete!”

“Jacksons weren’t the first bad client and they probably won’t be the last. Come on, boss. We’ve both been doing this long enough to know that every now and then you just end up with a client who actually have no idea what they want. Even less often, we fail to notice it at the earliest stages of the project. Shit happens.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I shouldn’t take it so seriously, but I do. What’s your initial view on this one?”

“It’ll be fine. He really does seem to know exactly what he wants. It’s not a big project, but a solid couple of months’ worth of time, I think.”

“Good, Mark. Will you actually be able to get the proposal written up before you go off?”

“I don’t go for almost another week, Andrew. I do have some other loose ends to tie up, but this should be an easy enough one to fit in. I’ll make sure Tracey knows what we’re planning and she’ll be able to cover for me while I’m away.”

“You’ll take your laptop with you, won’t you?”

“Yes, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll get wi-fi or even a cellular signal in some of the places on the itinerary.”

“I’m over-thinking, aren’t I Mark?”

“Maybe a little. I get it. I haven’t had a proper holiday for three years and the timing now looks a little less than optimal. We’ll make it work.”

“I know. I’d better get back to my office. Keep me in the loop, Mark.”

“I will, boss.”

Andrew heads briskly off towards his office and I turn to go in the opposite direction, back to my own space, but Nina, the receptionist calls to me as I start to leave.

“Mark, there’s been a delivery for you.”

“Oh, that will be the book that I ordered, I think.”

“Well, it is in Amazon packaging, so probably. Here you go.”

Sure enough, it’s a fairly small cardboard box, the usual sort with the tear-strip to break it open. “Thanks, Nina. I’ll go and open this at my desk.”

There’s a sandwich and a bottle of Cherry Pepsi Max on my desk when I walk in. Tracey looks up from her desk on the opposite wall and smiles at my sigh of relief.

“I figured you’d be hungry when you eventually got out of the meeting,” she tells me. “I got your usual when I went for mine.”

“Tracey, you may have saved my life. I’m starving. I was so busy getting ready for the meeting this morning that I had to skip breakfast.”

“Good meeting, though?”

“Yeah. Looks pretty routine stuff. At least the client knew what he wanted. I’ll bring you up to speed later on.”

“What’s that? Not another book?”

“Well, I think so. Let me take a look.” I pull the tear strip, which inevitably breaks half-way along and then have to struggle for another thirty seconds pulling at tiny bits of carboard until I finally get inside.

Tracey has moved over to get a closer look as I open the package and take out the contents. “Birds of East Africa,” she mutters. “You’re not a bird-watcher, are you?”

“Well, not exactly, but there won’t be lions and elephants at every turn and I am at least interested.”

“You really are taking this whole trip very seriously, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am. You know how much I’ve always wanted to go on Safari. I feel like it’s now or never. It is making me go a little over-the-top, but I can’t help it.”

“Well, you’ve got to spend your hard-earned cash on something and it is much better to see you spending it on yourself.”

“Better than on a certain somebody else, you mean?”

“Sorry, Mark, but yes. He was a drain on you in far too many ways.”

“So you keep telling me. Time and time again, in fact.”

“You know it is only because I want you to be happy. Simon wasn’t good for you. It took you far too long to realize it.”

She’s right and I know it. Despite everything that he had done, he seemed to think that I still owed him something and I guess that sums him up pretty well. I should have seen the signs that he was using me much earlier than I did.

Honestly, it should have been obvious right from the start. He was attractive and funny and I was happy to be noticed and I guess I was easily charmed. He seemed to slip into my life without effort, moving into my house and making himself comfortable. For two years I never even though about the fact that I was paying all the bills and that he never seemed to spend much time working.

I could use the excuse that I was very busy, but really, I was just treading water because whatever we did have was comfortable. When things finally came to a head, I felt such a fool, but my friends - Tracey and Andrew in particular – rallied round and kept me on a reasonably even keel.

I was lucky that I went home early that day. I’m sure that, otherwise, the letter from the loan company addressed to both of us would have never been seen by me. At least I had the sense to phone them immediately, rather than talking to Simon about it first. My second phone call was to the police.

I’m not even sure whether it was the fact that Simon was doing something dodgy that shocked me the most, or the fact that the police weren’t entirely surprised. In the end, the police uncovered a complicated and, frankly, disgusting chain of attempts to gain financially at the expense of others. I did feel slightly less guilty myself when I realized that I wasn’t the only victim, but only slightly.

It didn’t stop it from costing me much of my savings, though. The loan company knew they were in the wrong, almost from the start, but they made me hire an advocate and go to court before they settled, costing me thousands that the settlement never really cleared up. They should never have been able to give Simon a loan that was secured on my house, but he had managed to convince them that it was jointly owned. Their biggest failure was in not getting my signature on any of the paperwork, something that was legally required whether it was jointly owned or not, if they ever hoped to enforce the contract.

Simon went to prison for a string of frauds. I had my chance to face him from the witness box, but in many ways wish I hadn’t bothered. Nobody gained from this whole exasperating fiasco, but he did finally get what he deserved. Two years in jail. Of course, with good behaviour, he will be out in half that time, but who knows, perhaps he will learn a lesson. I’ve certainly learned mine – single is safe.

At least, when he eventually gets out, he’s unlikely to stay on the Island. He’s not local and now his card is marked. The court could have ordered his deportation after the end of his sentence, but that’s not something that happens very much these days. Most such criminals simply want to get away when their time is served.

Even in my lifetime – and thirty-two years isn’t all that long at all – the Isle of Man has changed greatly. We now live in a far more cosmopolitan and diverse society, even if the population is still small. That doesn’t stop us from being fiercely Manx when the need arises. We may be laid back and relaxed, but that doesn’t bar us from being a bit militant about keeping things that way. You don’t hear it as often as you once did, but my dad is fond of pointing out that “If they don’t like it, there’s a boat leaving every morning!”

He does, however, border on being just about as militantly Manx as it is nowadays possible to be. With a family name like Killey – which incidentally isn’t pronounced like it looks (more like kill-e-ya, deliberately saying the ‘y’ consonant) – it would be difficult to get more Manx and the same is true on both sides of my family tree. The fact that grandpa may have had a hand in burning holiday homes in the 1970s is a bit of a bone of contention among the modern extended family.

Anyway, now all the Simon-induced fuss has died down and I’m getting my life back onto some sort of positive trajectory, I’m taking my first proper off-island holiday in more than three years. With a life-long love of wildlife and nature, having been raised watching natural history programs on the television, I was finally going on a safari.

I’d realized pretty early on that I was not in a position to arrange a solo safari for myself, not least because I had no idea where I actually wanted to go. Fundamentally, however, I simply couldn’t afford to go to Africa on my own and needed to find an alternative.

Luckily, there are quite a few organisations that arrange group-based holidays and welcome single travellers. I diligently did my research, trawling the internet looking at reviews and recommendations from real people – TripAdvisor really is a mine of information. Many of the reviewers shared a similar view – you needed to go for two weeks if you could afford it and Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia were pretty good places to start.

When I finally accepted that I was dithering about the whole project, I bit the bullet and booked a 14-day trip to Kenya and Tanzania with a small, but very well-regarded company that actually specialised in catering to first-time single travellers. They were small enough that, once my deposit was paid, I got an email directly from someone called Peter Townsend who, apparently was one of the founders of the company and would be our primary guide on the trip.

While accepting that I was paying him a small fortune for the trip, it was still really nice to get that personal level of attention. He explained in great detail what I would need to bring along, how much we might need to have in terms of ready cash for drinks and tips, what vaccinations I might need – although he also told me to call my local health centre and speak to the nurse for confirmation – and what might be required in terms of visas and permits. The more he explained things, the more I realized that I would never have been able to do this for myself.

With my itinerary in hand, I dug deeper into the recesses of the internet, finding out as much as possible in advance about the local customs and laws that I might find relevant. This reading caused a little concern, but I wasn’t going to either of these conservative countries looking for romance – or even simply for sex – and didn’t feel that I had anything to worry about as long as I wasn’t outrageously gay in my dress or behaviour.

Peter had offered me an upgrade to single occupancy, but I had explained that I was near my budgetary limit already and was more than happy to share. Apparently, there were going to be sixteen people in the group in total, resulting in a three-vehicle convoy with Peter and another guide leading the group. So pretty crowded but not crazily so.

Without breaking the budget, it is possible to visit all the famous national parks by carefully choosing accommodation that isn’t at the ridiculous levels of $500-per-night exclusive lodges. This trip managed, on paper at least, to do just that. All the accommodation was full-board, but we would have to settle our own bar bills. Many of the chosen lodges were barely large enough for the whole group, potentially giving a nice family atmosphere to the whole trip.

“Who’s taking you to the airport,” Tracey asks after looking over my shoulder at the illustrations in the bird book for a minute or so.

“My Dad. He has the day off for some reason or other anyway and it saves the cost of a taxi. If I was going for a shorter time, I’d have taken my car down and left it, but for two weeks, it’s too expensive.”

“Are there really birds that vividly coloured in the world?” Tracey mutters as we get to the kingfishers. She has a point. The illustrations show birds of such vivid blues, reds and greens that it’s a bit of a shock to the system.

“Apparently so. I’ll let you know in three weeks’ time!”