Where the Atlantic waves crash onto the shores of Cornwall, grow things that remind me of me. Things that just cling onto whatever surface they can and make themselves thrive. I’ve always been good at getting on with things, no matter how difficult they are so I see an analogy here.

Here, a piece of slate thrusts up out of the sand on the beach at Crantock. The Atlantic Ocean tumbles, rushes and crashes over this rock for several hours twice every day with a relentlessness that is only really equalled by the earth rotating the sun and the moon rotating the earth. I fact, the waves that crash onto this shore are bound into a pact with the phases of the moon.

The slate is home to barnacles, mussels, limpets and seaweed, all finding whatever imperfections in the surface of the slate they can that will support themselves and hang onto the rock instead of being tugged out to sea.

Today has been surreal – I have been given access to a secret to which I find myself extremely thrilled to be privy. Something that makes my friends very, very happy. There was I, expecting one thing and finding myself confronted by something entirely different. Sometimes though, even though you are wrong-footed, you see clearly afterwards that something is so right that it makes absolute sense.

I need to leave that subject still with a bit of mystery for reasons that I will expand on later.

I will, though, give a bit of a teaser…..

David and I are, as you know, long-time friends and relatively short (though six years now so I’m hardly just another in a string of transient girlfriends for him) lovers. We have had such a wearing few weeks that we’ve done nothing but loll about on the sofa when we’ve been at home together.

Last week, we watched a film (I won’t say its name in case you’re sitting down to see it tonight!) that, if I’m honest, we’d probably never have chosen had there been something ‘good’ on the telly. It was one of those ‘oh well, we’ve never heard of anyone in it but it looks like we’ll both at least think it’s OK’ moments that we seem to face all-too-often. What we saw though, was a really sweet love story about a couple who seemed destined never to really hook-up despite a deep mutual attraction. They keep bumping into each other and sharing moments of happiness and/or pleasure but without making it to being a couple.

At the end of it, we agreed we’d both loved it and DM came out with a really nice phrase – he said ‘anyone can meet, fall in love and have a relationship, it takes something special to keep on meeting, feeling that attraction and finding your way into a relationship’. I was thrilled he’d given it that much thought. We made it eventually, as did the couple in the film……he gives me an anchor and I give him the fertile environment for his creative spirit.

Last year, in one of those bouts of amazing coincidence or possibly showing how we are nothing more or less than creatures of habit, we were drinking Rioja!.