When I stepped outside the tent I don’t think I meant to be gone long – no Captain Oates, me. I’m not even sure I knew I was stepping outside. But in the event I did. I went on my trip, saw through the next two winners (Avedon Carol and Rob Hansen), safely handed the European TAFF reins – and all the cash, at least as much as I’d inherited from Dave Langford – over to Rob, and dropped out of view.

The next time I look up it’s 2020 and I’m a retired man with wife (Diana), two daughters (Ellie and Tris), a son-in-law (Joe), a granddaughter (Sam) and a daughter-in-law (Emily). It doesn’t seem that long ago.

It is strange but true, and definitely clichéd, that the year of my TAFF trip changed my life. It also led directly to my leaving fandom. Some would say it was moving to Manchester that did for me – Manchester was at that time a renowned graveyard for fans – but Manchester wouldn’t have been enough on its own.

Having won the TAFF contest against the redoubtable Rog Peyton on the American vote – it was pretty much dead even in Europe (Rog edged it by 2 votes) – I unconnectedly resigned my job with accountants Ernst & Whinney and joined Shell UK in Manchester. This meant I had some leave from E&W to use up in the first half of the year, and joined a writers’ gathering in Cornwall which otherwise I would have had to miss to save my leave for my TAFF trip. The writers included a certain Diana Reed who I had known since university, some twelve years before. It was in Cornwall that we realised that there might be something interesting happening between us.

So I went to America, came back, was offered a chance of a three week assignment in Kenya with Shell (grabbed it), got married (to Diana – some of you were there, you saw it), and had our first child, Eleanor (though Diana did the heavy work, of course) who turned out to suffer from hydrocephalous and went through three neuro-surgical operations by the time she was a year old.

It is said that the highest stress events in life include marriage, moving house, changing jobs, having a child, having a severely ill child, and international travel. It might seem like a good idea to get them over and done with, but I don’t recommend it. All that compressing them into a couple of years does is open up more vistas of time for further stressful events.

Though Ellie turned out fine, more than fine, with an Oxford degree and a PhD in biochemistry, her early years were immensely worrying for us, with several hurried, anxious visits to Manchester’s Booth Hall Children’s Hospital and the redoubtable consultant Miss Bannister when her symptoms seemed to recur. I had never thought that conventions were fit and proper places for young children and didn’t want to leave Diana on her own coping with Eleanor for any length of time, so I stopped going to them. I just got out of the habit of fandom and it’s hard to get it back. ‘Gafiate’ seems too active a word for it – ‘dafiate’, maybe: drifting away from it all.

(Fact checking on Wikipedia, I find that Booth Hall closed in 2009. Oh, well.)