I creep out of cosy land and pick up some clothes on the landing that I put there late last night, and gently edge down the stairs in the dark, thinking about my friend Eric who can’t see.

Is it like this for Eric every moment of every day? Into the kitchen, light on, kettle on, three slices of bread in the toaster. One slice is for Torben, the dog, who now has a pink collar. He’s castrated and I notice for the first time that his dick has shrunk and he hasn’t even got a towel, or corner to cover his shame. Blimey, looking at a dog’s genitals at 5.40 in the morning must be the first step on the road to somewhere unpleasant.

I finish my toast and tea and too tired for the bike, decide to take the car to Chiswick Bridge. It is just getting light at 6.45 when I get to the Tideway Scullers boathouse. Rak is there early. Rak is a lawyer; apart from our age and a willingness to turn up we don’t have so much in common but we’ve been rowing together happily now for about 10 years.

Rak calls the shots and it’s a pyramid (a training session that alternates between bursts of hard and easy rowing) down to Hammersmith against a strong flow and a steady state row back down the middle of the river. I feel good, all things considered.

Rak likes films and stories and rowing, he has four children and is part of a close family. For some reason as we put the boat back in the boat shed, he tells me a story that Somerset Maugham had written based around a text from the Koran — The Appointment in Samarra.

The gist of it is this: two men, a master and his servant were riding towards Mecca and they met Death on the road with a surprised expression on his face. The master turned his horse away from Death and raced away to Samarra. The servant looked at Death and said, ‘Why were you so startled to see my Master?’ Death said, ‘I was surprised to see him here as I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra’.

For some reason I seem to attract tales of mortality; I’m like that character in a Peter Cook sketch, Arthur Jackson, who had two sheds and everything had to relate to his two sheds. So if someone, for example, told him the tale about the road to Samarra, Arthur would say something like “Well that’s all very well but what about the importance of my two sheds and Death?” So he was always referred to as Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson.

Am I Andy “Mortality” Ripley?

It is a Tuesday afternoon in London and I’m sitting in a fashionable restaurant trying to put my finger on Ripley’s game. He is not Martin Johnson: he has never won a World Cup for England. He is not Dean Richards: nobody has ever suggested he was the greatest No 8 of all time. “Basically he won absolutely nothing with England,” my colleague Stephen Jones recalls.

So what’s the deal with this guy? What it is about Ripley that has enchanted me since boyhood? Why have I come to London this afternoon? And why do we find ourselves still lowering shots of espresso six hours after meeting for lunch? “I’m like one of those ugly Americans you meet on a ski-lift somewhere,” Ripley says, “and within five minutes they’ve told you their life story.” But this is no ugly American.

A phenomenal athlete with film-star looks, Ripley won 24 caps with England in the 1970s, was a star of the BBC’s Superstars series in the 1980s, and almost became the first 50-year-old to row in the Boat Race for Cambridge when he returned to university to complete a degree in the 1990s.