The quest for Gaia seemed to have stalled at San Diego, Helen was now failing, and I was due for more corrective surgery at Taunton hospital. The prospect was grim, but then suddenly in April 1988, things changed and this is what this chapter is about. But the title is, I admit, outrageous. I chose it deliberately to cock a snoot at the dull grey pessimistic world I then seemed to inhabit. I am aware that some may see it as unkind and discourteous to Helen’s memory, but this is not my intention. I want to show that life can indeed begin again at seventy, and this is how it happened. In the autumn of 1987 Wilfrid Grenville-Grey wrote me to say that he and Mrs Orchard would like to visit and discuss my appearance at the Global Forum, due to be held in April the next year. This was a meeting that I had somewhat regretfully agreed to attend and to deliver a fifteen-minute speech. They never came, but I imagined them to be seriously Anglican, and these suspicions were confirmed when I read in their letter that they intended to visit me by travelling from Paddington to Liskeard in Cornwall.
