Stage 1 - Easter
Temporarily split up with Wickedex, have nervous breakdown, nearly lose job.
Forward thinking: minus 40 points.
Grand strategy score: minus 10.

Stage 2 - Spring
Pull life together, lose two weeks' wages after not turning up to the |genericjob| - it interrupted my nervous breakdown schedule. Regain sanity. Use up a year's promotion pay to fund Wickedex's ten week holiday in Australia as an early birthday gift. Receive a fake birthday present in my turn that ends up costing me sixty pounds, because she forgot to get me anything.
Approach whole Oz trip thing with trepidation as Wickedex morphs into Scrooge. "Why the hell are you buying that shampoo?! Don't you know I have a trip to Australia to save up for?"
Reason for paying for her trip: wanted her to stop being with me out of habit. Wanted her to be with me out of choice. Had intended to pay another eight hundred pounds to join her there for part of the trip - until I crash the car. Wickedex refuses to pay any money towards replacing it. "Don't you know I have a trip to Australia to save up for?" New car costs #5K. Lambasted for being jealous of her trip. Fuck me. I don't want to go to Australia. I can get racism in Bermondsey, mate.
Forward thinking: minus 20 points.
It could be that I faked the car crash as a convenient excuse. From the grassy knoll.
Grand strategy score: minus 30.
Hitler would have been too poor to annexe Austria at this rate.

Stage 3 - Summer
Spend a summer blogging, overheated, immobile, and being fairly drowned in tedium.
Wickedex effervesces with lengthy descriptive emails while alone in New Zealand, but once back in Sydney has more important things to do than email me. Gets annoyed that I invited round four friends she doesn't like. How dare I forget the rules about not mentioning my friends, etc.
Doesn't telephone as it would "cost too much money".
Have to spend time convincing people that although the blog may sound action packed, leaving the house once every fortnight doesn't actually constitute a giddy social whirl.
Everyone I know tells me to stop whingeing on about missing her. The frostiness penetrates even my thick skull though, and when people set dates for late September, I begin my reply, "it depends if I get dumped or not..." (no unregistered friends rule, remember?)
Forward thinking: 40 points.
Good choice not to blog the seventeen all-night lesbian orgies. Then my lies and deceit would have become transparent. And - aha! I mentioned "dumped"! Could it have been any clearer what I was up to?
Grand strategy score: minus 10.
Weak.

Stage 4 - early Autumn
Wickedex returns. Is furious that I didn't skip work to collect her from the airport 25 miles away, and that the freeholder changed the lock on the front door. Everything I say is wrong; if I speak, eyes are rolled, if I enter a room, she clucks her tongue. Apparently jet lag makes one do this. Privately, I resolve that if this continues for more than a fortnight (jet lag's supposed to be over in 48 hours, isn't it?) then we probably need to split.
Wickedex gazumps me. She dumps me within six days flat. I am told how cruelly ignorant I am of the sheer pressure of doing a temp job for three months. (Those three years I temped to fund my travelling do not count.)
Tiny flat seems smaller. Two people who are supposed to loathe each other, suddenly. Not good.
Forward thinking: 20 points.
Aha! Clear, crystal evidence that I planned it - had the date set all along. [This is not at all comparable to pretending that jet lag makes you bitchy for weeks on end.]
Grand strategy score: minus 20.
Shoulda thought about the somewhere to live option . . .

Stage 5 - late Autumn
Not wanting to be homeless, I agree to buy the jointly owned flat we live in. Ooops. Worst point in the market to do so - prices are high. Wickedex sets the price at well over #200,000. Easily five times my salary. At which point I wig out, and demand she leaves. She does so.
Spend large amounts of time ill. Overcome previous problems with opening mail or using the phone. Manage to find a fool who will lend me that sort of money, and a willing victim to rent a room from me. Still, it's pretty near the breadline; will have no disposable income ever again (working for local councils catches few big raises). Wickedex posits getting back together again. I refuse.
Despite the fact that she dumped me, everyone I know is under the remarkably coincidental impression that I've made her homeless, jobless and penniless, and that her life is ruined.
Forward thinking: 50 points.
It's so pleasant, here in her flat, surrounded by all her things, knowing that every weekend she's going to turn up and smash things at random. I don't need holidays or clothes, surely. All has turned out beautifully.
Grand strategy score: 50.
Patently, I'm making a bundle out of the poor woman.

Stage 6 - Winter
She demands I pay her half of the mortgage. I refuse. Wickedex will not countenance a lodger in "her" property. When I offer to reimburse half her current rent once the flat is sold, am instructed to pay half her rent now. Not sure what that means, as she's living rent free and bill free with my friends. Wickedex protests how poor she is. I point out that I know full well she has enough cash on hand to pay a deposit and two month's rent right away. Saying this out loud is construed as a Very Very Bad Thing. Must not contradict the doctrine that She Is The Victim Here.
I give up, and agree to sell. The Wickedex Moneymaking Machine moves into action, and the place is besieged by moneygrubbingbastard agents. Who say it's overpriced. They suggest dropping the price to #220,000 for the one and a half bedroom flat.
I offer to move out and let her live here. Things in the flat keep breaking. She's here when I'm not, and things are moved; yesterday I came home to a definite instinct that she'd been in my bed.
I point out that I could afford the flat myself, if the price drops. "Well, you think about that." Am unable to stop crying and the lack of a lockable door is sending me mad. Am told by a third party that I planned this all along.
Forward thinking: minus 20 points.
Should have thought about the going mad part back when you planned the whole 'Steal Wickedex's Earthly Fortune' campaign, back in January.
Grand strategy score: 150.
I'm not sure how.

So there you have it. How to make yourself homeless, turn all your friends against you, and send yourself mad, in six easy months.
Fergawdssakes, I planned it ... ? A mongoloid chimp could have planned better than that.