Ian and I are both amazed by success. It was not what we sought when we set up Elemental. Of course, we wanted it to work, we wanted to do the things we did best every day - wringing iron and shaving wood. But the degree of success has astounded us. There aren’t enough hours in the day, there aren’t enough experienced, talented iron-workers and carpenters, and there are too many rich, demanding customers. Our work has featured in trade magazines and Sunday papers, in lush, thick coffee-table books about house restoration and improvement. For our decks are not simply load-bearing, they are works of art. We began simply, with wooden rails, slatted floors and the occasional spiral staircase. But now the decks incorporate fused glass, granite, sand, driftwood, pebbles, columns, second storeys, movable sections. They are a mélange of cedar, pitch pine, haze] pine and teak; mahogany and walnut, elm and lime. I have supplies of purple- and green-heart delivered from the West Indies for decoration. Ian and I comb restoration yards for materials of terracotta and Bath stone, rusted metal and chains. We once built a deck with the pitch pine planks from a Scottish brewery supporting a pulpit and curved rail from a Welsh Methodist church. Let it not be said that deck-builders are without humour. We have even built a deck with a glass floor, on the third storey of a Victorian building in Charlotte Street. What, I wonder, do the people in the garden flat below see when they go out to look at the stars?

Ian delights in linguistics, revels in the intricacies of language, and every week he adopts an orphaned word. Perhaps he likes the sound of it, or the shape of it, and he tries to worm it into every conversation he has. It can be anything - propinquity, jurisprudence, flotsam, banjaxed, jinxed, neoteny - and he’ll use it whenever he can. He says, and I think he’s right, that we don’t use our language, don’t explore it. He says we’ll all soon be reduced to five hundred words, mere grunts expressing simple desires, Riddley Walker-like. His word for this week is ‘incandescent’, which strikes me as being a bit too work-related.

The moment my heart stopped I loved Sonja more than I’d ever done. Merely touching her ankle had undone me. She reached out for my hand and my heart stopped. I can remember feeling as if the ball had hit the net again, as if Geoff Hurst had kicked that glorious shot into my chest and the ball was ballooning through me. That is the last thing I remember. Apparently I keeled over like a felled oak, like Lincoln’s cherry tree, like a Californian redwood — which seems an appropriate response for a carpenter to have when his heart stops. My next thought was entertained in a bed in hospital. I can’t remember what the thought was but I think it was that I was hungry. Sonja was sitting next to my bed holding my hand and I have always been convinced that she’d never let it go. She just smiles when I suggest this.