It all started with a humble piece of Styrofoam, four feet by three – a great watershed, so to speak, in my life. That was the seed, the singularity. My son Bruno (now a fully grown doctor) was visiting me in the US – he was fifteen at the time – and we decided to take a road trip to Florida from New York, a good eighteen hour journey. He lived in Cornwall then and was a keen body-boarder, equipped with wetsuit, fins – the works. He suggested we rent a board, also called a “boogie board”, for amusement at the beach. We checked out Ron Jon's in Cocoa Beach, a huge surfing shop (I'd never been into one before), and found that the boogie boards were on sale, so I bought one with a dark green bottom and grey plastic top for about sixty bucks. It wasn't top of the line, but it was serviceable enough, and it was only going to see a couple of weeks of use. Little did I know what would grow from that initial germ!

I had always regarded the beach with some misgivings. I'd walk on it in Blackpool with the dog, but I had no great interest in lingering there. On summer holidays to Greece or Spain I'd dutifully acquire a bit of a tan, but found myself generally bored on the sand. I didn’t much like to read on the beach, because of the glare of the sun, and after an hour or so I was just too hot and bothered. I’d go in the water for a dip and a perfunctory swim, but that palled quickly too. I was constitutionally beach-averse; I didn’t even like the sand clinging between my toes.