Two evenings a week, no matter how late we finish work, Ian and I go to the gym. After I had the pacemaker inserted, the surgeon told me to exercise. More importantly, he told Sonja I should — seeing a lack of enthusiasm on my part -and she called Ian and told him, and he phoned my mother and told her. Then my mother came up to see me and took me to register at a health club. So I do it. Ian needs to work out like a bear needs toilet paper but he does it too. He does it for me (although I have sometimes caught him looking at a number of trim, Lycra-clad buttocks). Always makes me smile — Ian and I walk in, black and white giants, dressed in tatty work shorts and vests, covered with smears of varnish and wood glue, and the young boys in their primrose and black Lycra turn pale and run. Ian lifts weights I can’t even move; he can bench-press three hundred pounds. On a good day I can manage two seventy but, as I waste no time pointing out to him, I have to lift it further because I’m taller. He just laughs. He pedals faster, runs further, leans over and ups the levels on my machines. I sweat, I curse, I get angry, and again he just laughs. At the end of a session we sit in the sauna and talk about how we can expand the business, build more decks, about how he will find the One.

Occasionally Ian and I go to Ashton Gate, with some of the carpenters from work, to watch the football. The colours and smells and movements are so distinctive, they’re the essence of my experience — the red-roofed stand, the waving scarves and red and white painted faces, terraces littered with cups and papers. The smell of frying onions and microwaved pies, cigarette smoke and sweat. I don’t need any cues to know when to yell and shout - every time a player misses from three feet, or falls and rolls in feigned agony. Every time the net bulges with a walloped shot I jump up and roar with the rest of them. I join in seamlessly. When it’s over we walk through Greville Smyth Park to the Nova Scotia and sit by the water, or in the snuggery, arguing the finer points of team selection and formation, only to come to the conclusion that it would help if the players could pass to someone wearing the same colour shirt.

It’s a small world, as I have said, a comforting world. I have for years, twenty-eight to be exact, avoided the unexpected. I revel in routine, in known parameters, in the predictable. But nothing is predictable now.