The day after the Woking Writers party Diana and I headed down to Cornwall. We decided that this was the time to take the second car down (as well as the first). Since one car is a large old Mercedes and the other a tiny Toyota Aygo which have very different driving characteristics, especially going uphill, we didn’t drive in convoy. Instead, we arranged to rendezvous at Cartgate picnic area, which is pretty much halfway. Diana set off first in the Aygo. She stopped for petrol, I bought buns to eat at Cartgate. I caught her up at the M3 and went sailing by.

Just short of Stonehenge, I pulled into a layby for a rest. My shoulder and neck start to ache if I drive too long. Six minutes later, Diana went past (yes, I was timing it). I passed her back on a stretch of dual carriageway. At Cartgate I stopped and got out of the car for a stretch and walk around while waiting.

After ten minutes I started to think Diana should have arrived. After fifteen I was thinking she should definitely have arrived and started thinking about invoking the emergency phone call procedure. We had agreed that, since you can’t answer a phone while driving, we should call the other three times, so that they could stop and call back. But then Diana called me. “I think I’ve overshot,” she said. “So do I,” I said. “I’m in the Blackdown Hills,” she said. “You’ve overshot,” I said.

We decided that I should eat my bun and have a cup of coffee from the picnic case, while she stopped at the Little Chef near Honiton for something similar. I drank my coffee in a leisurely way and set off. I thought I might call in at the Little Chef to see if she was still there and as I pulled in I saw through the shrubs a little red car moving off. It was Diana, so I drove through the car park and followed her out onto the road, overtaking on the dual carriageway.

West of Exeter I stopped again (shoulder) and Diana went by again. I overtook, again, and after three hours and fifty minutes of driving time (nearer five hours elapsed) reached Wadebridge. I just had time to drive into the garage door before Diana arrived.

Monday we spent doing very little and on Tuesday we went to the doctor for our initial appointments. This was where, as new patients, we had to explain our current ailments and set up repeat prescriptions. This took some time. With age come ailments. By the time I’d finished explaining what there was, the doctor said I should book another appointment – “In fact, make it a double” – in two weeks to go through a couple of things in full detail.

(Even as I write this first draft, the “with age come ailments” principle is playing itself out in the Mercedes, which has just failed its MOT on the grounds of corroded rear brake pipes, and has a couple of advisory actions on items which are wearing out, but not yet significantly. Maybe it’s time to replace it, an option available on a car but not necessarily on a person.)

Diana started cutting plants back in the herb bed and accumulated a sackful of dead twigs, so we investigated Cornwall Council’s garden waste scheme and ordered a brown bin and a permit up to September. She also went down to yoga class in the town hall.

On Thursday we went to Polzeath. There was little cloud and though the breeze was cool, it was the sunniest day on the beach we had had for a year or two. We strolled across the beach and into the Waterfront bar for lunch. The Waterfront is not quite on the waterfront, except on the very highest tides when the sea floods the road, but it is up stairs so you get a good view across the beach to the sea and cliffs. After lunch we followed the tide out. The water running down the sand from the streams was surprisingly warm, which we surmised came from being shallow and spread out under the sun. Most of the pools left behind by the tide had also warmed, but the sea itself – no. Ten Celsius according to weather websites, which I can quite believe. There weren’t many people in the water; the waves were too low for decent surfing. But three had taken long-handle paddles and were standing on their boards paddling away, and occasionally catching a wave for a few feet.

As we approached the steps up to the cliff, a Kelly’s ice cream van came across from the car park to the foot of the steps to get the custom of the people who had based themselves there. He succeeded, and I came away with my first ’99’ of the year.

On Sunday morning Wadebridge Bowling Club was holding an open morning. I had been talking about joining a bowls club for a while, so this was my opportunity. (Bowls is genetic. My grandma and grandpa Smith played, my father played, my brother plays – all at county level – and my nephew is an under-25 international.) Wadebridge Bowling Club has an interesting website, which I suspect has been developed by its younger members and hasn’t been looked at by its traditionalists. Any club claiming to have been founded a few years prior to the Black Death is worth a try, I thought. (Check it out here.)

Diana came with me, to watch, and we parked in the free-on-Sundays little car park next to the bowling green. Several people were already there. Bowls club members could be identified by white jackets and grey trousers, the rest of by varieties of clothing and colour. A member came up and found me a rink to join and a set of woods. We bowled a few ends, learning a few basic rules and getting an approximate feel for how hard and how wide you have to deliver the woods. One lady was having trouble sending the woods far enough and in trying to put in more effort, kept delivering them off to the left. The other lady proved extremely accurate, hitting the jack several times, but usually with too much weight. I tended to over-adjust between too long and too short. But we all “won” some ends and then the coach called time. I decided to sign up, filled in the form and paid my £10 affiliation fee. The club gives free membership for the first year, apart from this fee, so that new members can use the cash to buy the necessary kit.

I sent off for mid-grey trousers the next day, from an internet bowls supplier. They arrived a couple of days later – not stylish (I haven’t owned a pair of trousers that colour since school uniform), but they fit, with a bit of room for expansion (which I intend not to need), and are teflon-coated to make them water and stain resistant. If you think of them as sports kit rather than clothing there’s no problem. My first club night was Friday, but rain prevented play.

On Monday bank holiday, in a complete change from bowls, Diana and I put on wetsuits and headed for Polzeath with our body boards, which we discovered fit nicely in the little car. The sun was out and the walk across the beach was great. The main risk was overheating. My feet realised first that we had reached the sea. Cold. Coldcoldcold. I waded out, nervously anticipating the first wave to hit the crotch. Having got that over with, it was down to catching waves. As usual, Diana was judging it well and caught a few good ones right into the shallows where the board grounds. I managed a few shorter rides, but never that exhilarating rush all the way. We didn’t stay in long. It was more the principle of the thing. Still in wetsuits, we drank coffee on the rocks (sitting on the rocks, that is, not with ice) while the tide reached its highest point and turned just below us.

On Tuesday I took the car for its MOT, which it failed (see above) but it was then repaired and passed. In the afternoon we went to Trelawney’s Garden Centre and found that they don’t have lawnmowers, but do have a loyalty card. Then we stopped off at the local library to join it.

On Wednesday it rained and we stayed in and read the books from the library. At various times I wrote and re-drafted this blog, which is getting entirely too recursive…

Saturday 27^th April was a significant day for Diana and me. It was the occasion of a party given by the Woking Writers Circle, and hosted by Amanda, to mark our moving to Cornwall and thus ceasing to be active members after seven years for Diana and five for me, the last two and a bit as Chair. It was a fun evening with Peter and Rosie, Dermot, Greg, Keith, Simon, Dave and our hosts Amanda and Rick, and we were very moved by the poems written for us. Thanks to all, and also to Liz, not able to be there, but sending her own card and poetical best wishes.

For a fuller write-up, see the Woking Writers website here and for photos here.

We thoroughly enjoyed being members, not only for the help it gave our writing, nor just for the help we were able to give others, not even for the way every meeting ended in the pub, but for the people who became friends. We shall miss it and them all. We don’t intend to lose touch, though imaginative ideas about skyping in to meetings every third Thursday will probably come to nought.

We haven’t discovered an equivalent group in Wadebridge or the locality yet, but we’ll look some more, and if we don’t succeed maybe we’ll have to found one ourselves, based on the WWC model.

Lots of things to write about since the last posting on August 25th – another Orieladelphians dinner, a replacement cooker, more surfing, for example – but two things have conspired to inhibit me from actually writing them.

First, my laptop developed sloth-like, not to say glacial, tendencies: click on <Word>, five minutes later Word opens. Click on <File>, five minutes later the File options deign to show up. Diagnosed as faulty hard drive. So I’m having to use the old PC in the hall instead, which means I’m not doing nearly as much.

Secondly, I have had my shoulder operation and it hurts and I’m on painkillers. It will get better eventually, but for the moment anything more than a few lines typing and a few clicks on the mouse is painful and I have to stop

Well, last Tuesday I did go to see the consultant about my MRI scan results. He showed me the pictures of my shoulder and pointed to a large white area. “This is a calcium deposit,” he said, “about 2.6 cm by 2.7 cm.”

That sounds big, I thought. “That’s big,” he said. “Too much to get rid of by injections. I think we have to operate.” So I’m booked in for second half of September. (Not all of it, just one day.)

I told number one daughter about this. “Where did the calcium come from?” she asked. I didn’t know, I hadn’t thought to query its origins. I was thinking more about getting rid of it. I checked on-line and found that the calcium is excreted by cells, but the cause is not entirely known.

Bearing in mind the gall stones I had last year, it seems clear to me that there is only one answer: I’m fossilising from the inside out.

I had an MRI scan last week. My right shoulder has been giving me gip for quite a while now and I’ve been progressing through various treatments. I had physiotherapy, which involved manipulation and electrotherapy and ultrasound and heat treatment. After four sessions, it appeared to be improving, but in the fifth session we tried acupuncture, which had no apparent effect, except that my shoulder felt worse again, and after the sixth it seemed back to where I started. The therapist recommended an X-ray.

So I returned to the doctor who agreed about the X-ray and followed it up with a steroid injection. Fortunately I’m not an elite athlete (nor any kind of athlete, as it happens) so there were no ramifications from that. (Whilst in A&E a few weeks ago, on an entirely unrelated matter, I spotted a notice in the triage room warning nurses to check with cyclists from the Olympics road races what medications they were allowed – obviously preparing for carnage in the narrow roads to Ripley and not wanting to have Bradley Wiggins disqualified from next year’s Tour de France.)

The steroid injection eased the pain a bit, but did not remove it, so my doctor filled out a form for an ultrasound scan and gave me the name of a consultant, whom I duly went to see. He discarded the notion of ultrasound and said I should have an MRI scan. We went through a safety checklist. The ‘M’ in ‘MRI’ stands for ‘magnetic’ and it’s a strong magnet in a scanner – three tesla. Doesn’t sound much, 3T, but the ITER fusion reactor only has 13T. You want to keep metal away from a 3T field. So, did I have a heart pacemaker? Any metal replacement joints? Any fragments of metal in my eyes? No I didn’t. “How about mercury amalgam fillings,” I said. Not a problem.

The radiologist went through the list again when I went for the scan, in the reception area before I got near the machine, just to be sure. Then I stripped off my clothes, down to underpants, and put on a gown. This was in a changing room, not the reception area, I hasten to point out. Good job I wasn’t wearing my chainmail pants, I thought. (No, not really. I just made that up.) I lay down on a bed with my shoulder wedged into a support to keep it still and in the right position. I was going to have to lie completely still for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes? I don’t think I’ve ever lain still for twenty minutes, while awake.

The radiologist warned me that it would be loud, like road works. “But we have headphones through which we will play music.” She put the headphones on me, gave me an emergency bulb to squeeze in case of emergencies, jacked up the table and slid me into the tube of the scanner. The music was some easy listening stuff that I didn’t recognise. It didn’t matter. The music was just to fill the gaps between different phases of the scan, because when the scanner started up that was all I could hear. To drown out the scanner you’d need Deep Purple on full throttle, though, come to think of it, heavy metal probably wouldn’t work inside a scanner. (Metal? Magnetism? It’s a… oh never mind.)

The main purpose of the headphones, I decided, was for the radiologist (who by this time was safely out of the scanner room) to talk to me. She announced three bursts of three minutes each. When they were over, she said there were eleven minutes to go. Still eleven minutes? I needed to move something. Would it be okay to wiggle my toes? The minutes dragged on. I stared at the  wide green line just off-centre in the roof of the tube. Or perhaps it was my head that was off-centre, for my shoulder to be in the right place. The line was maybe ten centimetres above my face. That was no problem; I went caving once, as part of a leadership training course, and the gaps were much smaller, the rock right in your face. How much longer to go? My body, inside the machine, felt hot and sweaty, whilst my feet were in the cool of the room. The noise was unceasing, but not constant, varying between continuous and staccato. I decided that I would not make a good secret agent, couldn’t take the torture.

Then it stopped. “I’m just coming into the room now,” said the radiologist. It was over. I dressed and she handed over a CD with the scan results to give to the consultant. So next Tuesday I’ll find out whether I need surgery, or what.

I took the Mercedes in for a service on Monday. New front tyres, new rear brake disks and pads, new springs on front suspension, new mass airflow sensor. New hole in bank account.

New mass airflow sensor? I didn’t even know it had a mass airflow sensor, or what a mass airflow sensor did, but what it does is ensure the right mix of air and fuel. When it doesn’t work, the car pulls away from stationary more or less as usual, but if you try to accelerate hard it gives a gallic shrug and potters up to your desired speed in its own good time. This is disconcerting when the first time it happens is during an overtaking manoeuvre…

Anyway, now I have a new one. Just thought you’d like to know.

In my garden the firethorn towers above its advertised maximum height, covers itself in white blossom and then red berries in due season, and thrusts spiny branches out to obstruct the croquet patch. The buddleia grows seven or eight feet in a year, pushing out purple cones of flowers. The berberis has purple leaves on the outside, green on the inside, and needle spines that penetrate leather gardening gloves if grasped too hard. When it rains, the weight of water on the leaves makes it loom forward over the lawn like Dracula, cloak spread to engulf a screaming beauty. The magnolia has exploded since the neighbours felled their eucalyptus. Gorgeous large flowers erupt for a time and shed masses of petals which rot in an attempt to smother the grass beneath.

The bay tree provides more bay leaves than my spaghetti Bolognese can ever use, and it uses them to outgrow the neighbour’s fir trees and become a danger to the house. There are two apple trees. The Cox grows, and grows, though hardly ever produces an apple. The Worcester Pearmain stays small, but sprouts apples at every conceivable vertex. The plum, on a pixie rootstock to restrict its growth, defiantly pushes branches up and out in all directions. Most years it doesn’t bother with plums, but every so often they are packed so densely that the branches bow to the ground and break. The pear tree grew for many years before deigning to produce a pear, but now does so regularly, the pears going straight from rock-hard to rotten, passing through edible in an instant. Against the side of the house, catching the morning sun, is a thornless blackberry which every year grows half a dozen shoots to a length of ten feet or more. It has driven out the other berries planted alongside it and now rules the wall.

The lawn is green, even in the driest years, thanks to the liberal sprinkling of buttercup, daisy, dandelion and clover. In the wet, it becomes soggy and impassable to mowers and turns into a hay meadow with white, yellow and purple flowers, and tall grass stalks topped with seed heads waving in the breeze.

The tools I use most have cutting edges. The spinning blade on the mower chops even long grass and handshears deal with the lawn edges. Secateurs enable precision pruning and a handsaw with vicious teeth cuts through thicker live wood. Long handled shears reach into the thorny plants. The long lopper, a ten foot aluminium pole with a blade on one end connected to a lever on the other, reaches the top of most trees, except for the rampant non-productive apple. An electric hedge cutter commits primitive topiary on the berberis and leaves the lawn studded with sharp points.

Gardening is a never-ending battle against the propensity of green things to grow too much. Gardening is trimming, pruning back, slicing off, cutting down.

So what is it about the damned runner beans? I plant a row from seed when the soil has warmed, water them in, stick in some canes. Each time I think about watering them some more, it is raining. Tiny green shoots appear – weeds. I realise that perhaps I should have planted more bean seeds, redundantly, so I pop some into a plastic tub of soil and put it in a propagator in the conservatory, which warms it to accelerate growth. A bean shoot appears, from the original batch in the garden, with two leaves, which last a couple of days before being chewed off. Another shoot appears which wafts around until it finds a cane to wind round, not the nearest, but any one will do. Holes appear in its leaves. A third bean plant appears, hiding in a batch of weeds to protect itself. Of the other half dozen there is no sign. In the propagator, nothing comes for days, weeks, then a couple of weeds poke through. It’s warm, damp soil, for christ’s sake! What more can those beans want?

Plants have their own agenda and grow to keep people off-balance and anxious. I look out through the dining room window at the garden where the long grass merges with the drooping shrubs and bushes, sealing off the gaps and exits and closing in on me.