The Surfboard

The evening kindled at the end of a long, speechless day. I had settled into myself as the miles fell on leaving London. Seven hours to ponder the week ahead. The car was now connected to me. We urged each other along. Humming together.

He lived in Cornwall on the North coast by the sea. I had a map drawn from memory after a gin-soaked evening of garrulous optimism in the depths of Wales. “I live there because the first time I saw the landscape it spoke to me. It’s real. That idea you spoke about. It’s real.”

We’d met at the Do Lectures on the edge of Cardigan Bay. A weekend of talks and workshops attended by people at an inflection point in their lives. I was invited to give a talk about an idea that had ‘had’ me. It led indirectly to the founding of the business I now run. When I finished speaking he and I queued for dinner and then sat next to each other to eat. We hit it off the way you do with strangers only rarely. He was a master of my own land who drew on the same well as me.

It was almost a year later to the day. The middle of June. Rain came down so heavily the windscreen wipers made little difference as I skirted the New Forest, turning the A27 into a river as I squinted my way. The flickering break lights kaleidoscoped by the water battering my windscreen. The torrent soon became too thick to see the woodland a thousand years before William the Conqueror had declared his hunting domain. The line of cars became a spent dribble as I headed West. The rain helped somehow. The car felt safe. Cosy.

I saw the sign for West Compton, waved to a friend I didn’t have time to stop and see, and then passed Long Bredy where the land would unfurl away from sight towards the sea. I’d stopped in Long and Little Bredy many years before without realising the church we parked outside was full of graves marked with the names of my distant family. I had sensed a connection to that place then. I could make out the landscape murmuring to me. I juddered up a steep short hill. Shifted down a gear and drifted over the top.

It was the day after my forty-first birthday. I was coming to terms with who I had become, which was not someone I ever expected to be. For the first time in a long time I was looking back. The previous decade had been a process of continuous change. After the financial crash of 2008 I lost my livelihood overnight as a writer and, with no qualifications or University degree, had to go back to working daily contracts for minimum wage. On my lunch hour while clearing out the rat-infested basement of an accountants in Bognor Regis I had an idea for what had, over the next eight years, grown into a multi-million-pound, global publishing company. But my marriage had collapsed in the process. Taking me away from my two beloved children and I was now engaged with another baby on the way. I caught my eye in the car rear-view mirror. How had a description like that ever come to describe me?