This is a true story, I think. It began when I was younger, crazier, in 1987, when I was forty-five, when my mid-life crisis suddenly leapt out if its box. Within three months, my wife left me for a better man, I was sacked for incompetence from my government job as a training manager, and my mother died from lung and throat cancer—brought on by forty years of heavy smoking and drinking, habits she acquired early to cope with her pervasive, but to me unfounded, sense of personal failure.  Over the next four months I became depressed and slid into…