Lizzie and I are trudging along a muddy footpath by a field, with Cedric.
Ahead, is the footbridge over a brook which marks the hallway point of the walk – where we’ll turn around and head back.
As we get closer to the footbridge, we realise Cedric is no longer with us. We turn and see he’s about 100m back, waiting for us on the path, staring with his beady eyes.
The crafty animal has realised we always turn around at the bridge. So why bother walking all the way there? He’ll just stay put and wait for us to return to him.
‘Lazy bastard,’ says Lizzie.
‘Yup,’ I say.
Ten minutes later, we’re near the end of the walk. Cedric is following us again.
We open the farmer’s gate, at the edge of the fields by Bunton, and step through onto the road which runs through the village.
As is his wont, Cedric hangs back, refusing to follow us through the gate – staring at as balefully.
‘Come on Cedric, you bastard!’ I call to him. The dog remains fixed to the spot.
It’s hard to tell if he’s refusing to come through the gate because he doesn’t want to be put back on the lead again. Or just because he knows it’s really annoying.
A staring competition ensues between me and the creature. And, as always, I’m the one who loses. I stomp back crossly through the gate and towards Cedric, then reattach him to the lead.
‘Shit!’ Lizzie says, as we walk the last stretch up the road to our house. ‘I forgot to bring my Apple Watch!’
‘NOOO!!!’ I screech, with mock horror. ‘If you didn’t record your step count, that means this walk has been a total waste of time!’
Lizzie nods. ‘Yup.’ She smiles, then looks thoughtful. ‘Isn’t it funny how we feel like we have to record everything, these days, otherwise it doesn’t feel like it really exists?’
I nod back… and we begin a brief conversation, for the last couple of minutes of the walk, about the current generation’s obsession with recording everything. Whether it’s syncing health data from their watches to their laptops… or writing blogs or filming vlogs about the most mundane of everyday experiences on social media.
Are we as guilty of the latter as everybody else? Lizzie, after all, has now started talking about her cancer on Instagram with The Hope Series. And whilst I’m currently only writing the content of this journal on my laptop, the thought of turning it into a blog has certainly crossed my mind.
As we finally approach the brown and grey stone façade of our house, I pull my iPhone out of my back pocket. Seven and a half thousand steps. A long way off the ten thousand I’m trying to achieve every day.
I wave my iPhone at Lizzie. ‘You know, I stick this phone in my back pocket for most of the day every day, so it can keep track of my step count. But, for all I know, this thing is irradiating my balls… and giving me ball cancer.’
I stick the phone back into my jeans back pocket, despite the risk of ball cancer.
‘So, obviously, if I am irradiating my balls that would be seriously unhealthy. Anti-healthy. The exact opposite of the kind of good health I’m trying to achieve by walking ten thousand steps a day.’
Lizzie looks at me quizzically. Where are you going with this, you freak?
‘What I’m trying to say,’ I say, as we step through the front door, ‘is that I’m obviously so obsessed with recording my health data, I’m actually willing to risk my health – or more specifically my balls – to do it. How ironic and frankly screwed up is that?’
Lizzie nods, shrugs, then puts the kettle on, her mind moving on to other things. I guess when you’ve had real cancer, listening to your other half hypothesize about ball cancer – and its significance to the zeitgeist – might lose a little of its dramatic interest.
P. D. Clifton 
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