GENESIS

Paul Root had worked hard all of his life and now, at the ripe old age of 65 had retired and was looking forward to some years of leisure and the chance to chase the things that he never had time to do when he was younger and working.

Paul had been a fireman for most of his life and had learnt lots of skills that he would still like to pass on.

"I'll do volunteer emergency work" he'd say to his pals.
"Those holiday areas where I want to settle always need volunteers with a bit of know-how".

Paul was right. Country, mountain and beach areas away from the city didn't have the resources of big towns and cities and community services relied on people like Paul to offer their help.
Paul's wife Gloria had died 10 years before (cancer) and they hadn't been lucky enough to have children.

"We had each other" Paul said through his tears to friends during his grieving years."Who could have wanted more"

Now Paul had sold up his and Gloria's house in the city and had moved north to a seaside community where he bought a small cottage by the sea with a fairly large garden and a nice big shed. The shed was big enough to house his car  his tools and, more importantly - a boat!
He was going to buy a 495 Workmate which is an aluminium runabout with a decent outboard.

The shed was big enough to take it plus room for an old mini-tractor to haul it down to the water and across the road for launching.

Things were looking good.

Paul, while liking to eat fish and to go fishing with friends didn't know a lot about the hobby so he looked on-line for his favourite and typed in 'Bass' in Google's search engine. There were many, many, many entries so he aimlessly strolled through until he found something that seemed interesting.

"Interesting" he thought and clicked on a link that said Richard's Bass Bag.
The link brought up a website that had lots of posts about strange things. He was interested but felt uneasy. He cursorily looked at some of the posts that ranged from an old demented guy complaining about being cold through posts about masturbatory fantasies involving self-flagellation to admissions that the writer's household appliances are in a serious state of disrepair.

"This isn't good" Paul said to himself and was about to click out of the blog link when he saw something  of real interest.

In the links section at the right hand side of the blog's home page was a list of links.
Paul had seen The Curmudgeon Ink and thought "That doesn't sound right". He clicked on the link and lo - a whole new world opened up to Paul.*

* To be continued.