I’m still in denial about the fact that my surfing days may be over. My board sits idle in the garage as it has for three or four years now. Life got in the way and when one gets to a certain age maybe one is wise to throw in the towel.

I keep threatening to make a comeback but my wife insists that won’t happen. We will see.

While I still have my board, she got rid of her bodyboard (or shark biscuit as I used to call it) some time ago.

We used to surf together which was great. When we first got married, I was having a surfing comeback after taking a few years off. We moved to Melbourne, I bought a very thick wetsuit, boots and gloves and surfed all year round down there which was, I think, rather brave for a Queensland surfer. Sandra got sick of sitting in the car or on the beach waiting for me so she got a bodyboard and a wetsuit and joined me.

And we surfed together then for a couple of decades. We even surfed in the UK together when on holidays there in the late 1990s. There’s a lot of good surf there but you have to be hardy.

We paddled out at Langland Bay on the Gower Peninsula in Wales and could hardly see the sets for the fog.

Most of our weekends involved surfing until school sport and work commitments limited our surfing safaris until they dwindled away to nothing. My son didn’t get around to surfing as a teenager but is now living in Sydney and is showing signs of taking it up too. He went out at Alexandra headland with some friends last year, caught the bug. Good on him.

My last surf was at The Pass at Byron Bay, one of those clean offshore days with a swell around a metre with waves peeling off down the beach.

It was winter and I remember coming in and peeling off my wetsuit and feeling like a million dollars. If you’re a surfer you’ll know that feeling.

It’s what kept me surfing all those years. I started at 13 on the Gold Coast. I kind of had to really because at Miami State High School if you didn’t surf nobody would talk to you.

I got a board soon after we moved there and started my surfing career around Northcliffe when we were living on the Isle of Capri. Eventually we moved inland from Broadbeach and I surfed around Kurrawa and then graduated to join the local crew at First Avenue.

Surfing got me through my teens and it’s a wonderful thing to do. And maybe I’m not done with it yet. Maybe I’m just taking another break.

I mean if I find myself at Noosa with the points firing it will be hard to resist although I’d need a new board to get going again. The one I have now is my least favourite. It was purchased at Noosa some years ago in a hurry because my beloved Local Motion thruster had been stolen from the roof of our car at the resort where we were staying. Bastards.

But even if I may not be surfing in reality right now, I am surfing between the ears. Everyday I watch surf videos of nutters dropping down the faces of huge swells at Shipstern Bluff in Tassie or Nazare in Portugal or Jaws in Hawaii. Or Teahupoʻo in Tahiti where they are holding the Olympic surfing.

I may not be surfing right now but I still identify as a surfer. Deal with it.