Just been listening to Argus by Wishbone Ash. It began as something to listen to whilst peeling potatoes, the idea of listening to something while peeling potatoes prompted by the sight of Diana’s headphones lying unattended on the window sill and the weight of my iPhone in my pocket. I don’t usually think to listen to something whilst peeling potatoes. It just never occurs to me.

While there is a fair bit of umpty-tumpty-tum in Argus – the rock equivalent of an oompa band, you might say – there are several good tracks. Diana’s favourite is ‘Worrier’ because of the line “I’d have to be a worrier…”, though the album sleeve persists in misprinting it as ‘Warrior’…

Album sleeve, did I say? Yes, I did. How did I come to be listening to an album with a sleeve on headphones whilst peeling potatoes? Do I have a portable turntable that I can just cart into the kitchen and plug in next to the kettle? I do not. I already said (or heavily implied, at any rate) that it was on my iPhone. It’s just that the original is an LP, a disc of vinyl in a cardboard sleeve in my study, but through the magic of a turntable with a USB cable and a piece of free software called Audacity I have converted it into an MP3 file and loaded it into iTunes on my iPhone – for personal use only, I hasten to add. This has the merit (ahem!) of reproducing the crackles and blips familiar from much playing in the old days.

I bought Argus many years ago whilst at university, largely because my friend Allan had it and we used to listen to it at his place, and also because it has a picture of a dark ages soldier with a spear looking into a sky containing a tiny flying saucer. It was the type of thing that was really meaningful back then.

The potatoes, to get back to the subject (I think), were for dinner on Good Friday, after a walk on the beach. We have been in Cornwall this time for about two weeks and this was our first trip to the beach. Partly it has been too wet and cold and partly it is the result of starting to think of ourselves as living here. As visitors, we just had to go to the beach as soon as possible, but as residents we can take it or leave it, like living in London and not bothering to visit the Tower, because it’s always right there.

Tris and I came down about two weeks ago, with a car load of her stuff from uni, and a few things of mine and Diana’s. Diana stayed in Woking so as to attend her final Surrey County Council Meeting on the Tuesday and came down by train straight after that. And in the fortnight before coming down we got the Woking house ready to go on sale.

A professional decorated Ellie’s old room (too complicated for us) and our bedroom (too big), while I painted the walls and woodwork in the kitchen and dining room. Then there was much cleaning and arranging of the decluttered furniture. Finally we got a couple of estate agents to look at it and tell us what price it should be. We chose one and they took the measurements and photographs and before the end of last week it was on the market. Several people came to view it, and one made an offer, which we accepted. Just like that. There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip, as the old saying has it, but so far so good.

This not-living-in-Woking concept is getting very concrete.

Another reason for going to the beach was that Tris’ friend Luke is visiting us over Easter, and as a visitor he just had to go to the beach as soon as possible. Luke and Tris can go striding off over the beach and cliffs at a pace that Diana and I no longer manage. There were quite a few surfers in the water, some of them so far out it seemed the waves would never break in time for them to catch, but clearly they were waiting for the one big one. It is still too cold for us to join them.

Argus has segued into Tales from Topographic Oceans (by Yes) on the basis of alphabetical order of artist. Before it in my list is White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground, another university days acquisition. To be accurate, it was a gift. It was bought by a friend who had heard it at a party in Cambridge and thought it was terrific. She went out and bought it and played it to us, extolling its virtues, but it seemed I was the only one who liked it. And as time went by (not much time, to be honest), she became less enamoured of it, veering towards dislike, and concluded that it was one of those “you had to be there” things and she wasn’t there any more, so she gave it to me.

A lot of my music stems from university, which coincided with the prog rock era, a music which suited the university ambience of long hair and beards. That doesn’t explain the Altered Images and Siouxsie and the Banshees albums, I confess. And how I came across the Blue Nile I’ll never know. Travel east to Egypt and turn right? Don’t be a smart aleck…

In case you were still wondering, the potatoes have been eaten, except for the ones that weren’t.

I’ve been spring cleaning my study in the last week or two. I packed up all the books into boxes, blowing the dust off, and took apart all the bookshelves to move them away from the walls. Similarly, I packed up the files and shifted the cupboards. I took the desk apart so it could be moved as well.

This might sound a little drastic just to do a little spring cleaning, even when I tell you that the shelves and cupboards had been in place for over a decade. The next step will sound even more drastic: reassembly in a new room 225 miles away.

I’ll come clean. This wasn’t just about spring cleaning. We are actually starting our move from Surrey to Cornwall. Diana’s study and Tris’ study were also packed up, plus the books, DVDs and shelves from the sitting room, and the dining room furniture. And a few other items. (But not everything.) Removal men put it all into two vans and I headed for Cornwall to get to the house ahead of them.

The idea was for the smaller van to unload in the late afternoon and return home the same day, and for the larger van to unload some things and finish off the following morning. Then they would take a couple of items to Eleanor in Oxford and three beds back to Woking, where Diana awaited them. (I’ll explain that later.) All went according to plan, until the larger van was a street away from the Cornwall house and its rear wheel all but fell off. The guys were kind of glad it hadn’t happened earlier, such as at 60 mph on the A303. Fortunately, the garage up the hill was right dealership for the van (Ford) and a man came down to effect sufficient repairs to enable the van to park outside the house overnight. They finished unloading in the morning, then took the van up the hill for a full repair. This took most of the day, apparently, and so the delivery to Oxford had to be delayed until the following Tuesday, though they did get back to Diana on Friday morning.

The guys unloading had a tough job. My study and Diana’s are at opposite extremes of the house – mine two floors up in the attic conversion and hers through to the back and down a level. The guys had a lot of going up and down stairs. On the few occasions where I could say “that goes in the dining room” or “that’s for the breakfast room”, they seemed very happy.

At the end, my study was full of boxes and pieces of furniture (by which I mean ‘furniture in pieces’), with barely enough space to squeeze between them. It was a matter of putting shelves up, unloading some books onto them and taking the empty boxes out of the room in order to open enough space to put the cupboards up and unload some files into them, and remove some more boxes. Finally I could put the desk together. There was more room to move in Diana’s study, so I was able to put up shelves and cupboards before she joined me, by train, on Saturday. On Sunday I moved one set of shelves to a more satisfactory place.

Then the work began.

I had to amalgamate the shelves and books from my study and the sitting room (since we won’t have many books in the Cornish sitting room) so there was a lot of sorting into order and deciding what went where. Also, taking out duplicates which we hadn’t managed to find in nearly thirty years of marriage. And, to free up space, taking out books I am not too bothered about keeping. This included a string of naval warfare novels set in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, bought when I ran out of new Hornblower stories and didn’t want to go cold turkey. At length I had all the books in various types of order. Then Diana found some more in a box so I had to go through again to find some more ‘disposables’, which of course were not in the same part of the alphabet as the newly discovered ones, so much shuffling of books along and between shelves was necessary.

Then the real work began.

I had several boxes of stuff collected over the years – memorabilia, things related to my career, old diaries and notebooks, photographs. These all had to be looked through to see if I really wanted to keep them. Most of the diaries just had work appointments and I really couldn’t see myself wanting to know which audit client I went to see on which day in 1980, when I worked for Ernst & Whinney. If I ever write an autobiography (highly unlikely), it won’t contain details of audit clients. So out went the diaries. Then there were my notebooks from my last ten years at Shell. (I didn’t have any paper diaries from this period, since we were all electronic by then.) The note books are chronological and contain interview notes, task lists, drafts of documents, rough plans, mind maps, records of meetings and other stuff. They are full of initials and acronyms which I had to struggle to understand, though it was common parlance at the time. It’s amazing what three years (nearly) can do to the memory.

Anyway, I should say, “the notebooks were…” because they too went into the recycling bin.

In this way, I emptied three boxes about the size of a case of wine (actually, they were exactly the size of a case of wine, that having been the contents prior to superfluous notebooks and memorabilia). Still got two left though, sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, sneering at me and saying “What are you going to do about us, then?” If they don’t shut up, it’ll be the garage for them. The old one, with the ivy growing through the roof.

I found other stuff, carefully hoarded, just in case, such as sheets of Letraset, once upon a time used for headings and titles in the camera copy for amateur magazines. I think I am safe in chucking them out. If we reach a state where laptops and the internet and electronic publishing all cease to work, 32 point Cooper Black transferrable lettering will be pretty far down my list of priorities. (The same reasoning might be applied to the vinyl LPs – but it won’t. I’m keeping them.)

The next thing I need to worry about is the CDs. They aren’t in the right place at the moment, but there is nowhere better to put them, and nothing better to put them in. I need to look out for a CD rack, preferably a cheap one in a second hand shop. I have a strong suspicion, however, that they will just sit where they are, annoying me mildly, for the next several years.

So now my study is useable, and Diana has sorted hers into shape too. The house is growing into the amalgam of both houses that we had envisaged. The collection of unwanted furniture in the (top) garage grows. Which brings me to the furniture going back east. Eleanor has long had her eye on the sofa bed and we were happy to let her have it, along with the dishwasher that became surplus to requirements when we had a new kitchen fitted in 2011. We’ve been trying for a year to find a way to get them to her that didn’t cost more for transport than buying new ones, and finally succeeded. As for the beds, well the Surrey house has three rooms that need to look like bedrooms again when it comes to selling, and we had excess beds in Cornwall from its holiday letting days. QED (or something like that).

The plan now is to be in Cornwall more than in Surrey, until we sell the Surrey house, at which time we will be in Cornwall very much more than in Surrey.

Cowabunga, dudes! The Smith family (Diana, Tris and myself) are out to hit the waves at Polzeath, not as famous as Newquay a few miles further along the coast, but better. We check the tide timetable and decide that five o’clock, a few hours after low tide, will be the best time, and that coincides with the best of the sunshine according to the weather forecast. Perfect.

We load the two surf boards into the car (two? For three people? What?) plus towels and dry clothes and head for the beach. In the school summer holiday period, the beach car park usually fills up, but by the time we get there it has emptied out a bit and we find plenty of space at the front, nearest the water. And at this time, parking is free.

First thing is to buy another surf board, and there are several shops selling them, but we  know precisely what we want, from which shop, so that’s done quickly.

The next thing, having changed, is to lock the car. I can’t just press the button on the electronic key, as usual, because then I would have to take an electronic key into sea water which seems a really bad idea. But there is a solid metal bit I can pull out of the electronic key unit and turn in the lock, and being solid metal, it is okay going into water. So I lock the car using that key and it doesn’t operate the central locking so only the driver’s door locks. I lock the three other doors from inside and then lock the driver’s door. That leaves the tailgate with its own lock into which the metal key will fit, except that it doesn’t. There is a blockage, the key won’t go in. So I lock the whole car with the electronic bit, open the door with the metal bit to put the electronic bit inside – and the alarm goes off. I stop the alarm, which unlocks all the doors. This is starting to look desperate. Will we all be able to go surfing, or will someone have to stay out with the car key? One final go: I use the electronic bit to lock the car with the driver’s door still open, put the electronic bit in a cubby hole in the car, then lock the driver’s door with the metal bit, and the alarm stays off! Excellent!

I pin the key inside a pocket in my swimming shorts and we head for the water.

How did you reach the shorts through the wetsuit, do I hear you ask? I’m glad you asked. Every body else in the water is in wetsuits, but not us. We is hardcore: swimsuits and t-shirts. We only use body boards, none of this fancy standing up, but we do it hardcore.

It feels cold walking across the beach and colder walking into the sea – the anticipation of that first wave hitting your genitals is like nothing on earth, except when that first wave actually hits – but once immersed it isn’t too bad. It even starts to feel warm. Tris and I walk out to where the water comes well above the waist and attempt to catch waves there. Diana stays in shallower water. I launch into several waves and get nowhere, but then I catch one and travel several yards before subsiding into the water. I miss a few more, then catch one again. This is fun. Even the mouthfuls of salty water don’t spoil it. I see Tris and Diana gliding into the shallows with satisfying frequency.

We swap boards around because the green one is worse than the two blue ones and it’s not fair, man, for one person to have to use it all the time. The first time I try it, it bends. It bends so much I immediately check it for a break, but it is still in one piece. It just bends. That’s probably why it doesn’t perform as well; I’m sure there is a reason that surfboards are flat rather than banana-shaped.

After something over half an hour, but less than an hour, we have had enough and return to the car. With the key that I haven’t lost from my pocket I unlock the car and open the door. The alarm goes off…

By the evening I ache pretty much all over, but the next day we do it all again and I discover it is possible to ache more than ‘all over’.