When she heard about the whale that had beached on golden sands she asked immediately what kind it was. And when they told her, she put on her nice dress and her new boots and new coat (well, new to her, they were second-hand from the Salvation Army shop in Whitehaven) and went straight down there to see it.

There comes a point when you will try anything. Harriet described herself as a whale therapist and said she would use techniques associated with these giant sea mammals to ease my anxieties. It seemed like a reasonable idea – I'd heard of equine therapy – so I turned up at a large detached house on the Loop Road in Whitehaven and waited for my instructions.

A metaphor appeared in our town and everyone wanted to talk about it. People are more comfortable talking about signs, symbols and metaphors than they are about real things, so it turned out that the metaphor appearing in our town was a very good thing for our mental health.

He said he had heard whales singing, many times he had heard them. A lovely moaning sound like a deep flute. He learned how to listen to the ocean by using bone conduction. You put the end of an oar against your head and put the other end into the water then you waited. All the sounds and vibrations from the ocean would travel up the oar and right into your skull. It was like being down there in the deep, hearing everything in stereo on his very own improvised hydrophone.

The whale had washed up in the small port of Whitehaven on the west Cumbrian coast and it was a long train journey up there from Bristol, the final section being a one-carriage rattler that hugged the coast down from Carlisle and tipped me out on a station so remote it seemed as if I had travelled backwards through time. It was dark and misty and I could only see a few feet in front me, but I managed to make out the lights of a car and when I went over I was pleased to find that it was a taxi. An extremely old vehicle in fact, a type of which I hadn’t seen in years – an Austin Princess. But it was in immaculate condition so I guessed the driver must have been an enthusiast of classic seventies models.

In olden times they used every part of a whale's body after they killed it. The meat, skin, blubber and organs were eaten. Whalebones were made into corsets and ceremonial things like masks. Whale teeth were engraved with pictures and inked with soot. The oil was used in lamps. Baleen, the fronds in the whale's mouth that filtered the plankton, were used for hairbrushes, fishing rods, pastry crimpers, shoehorns, hat-rims, prosthetic limbs, tongue scrapers. throat swabs, wind-up toys, hula-hoops, divining rods, piano keys – all made out of baleen.

Funnily enough, I met my wife when we were both walking through a dead whale in Burnley. I mean, we didn’t start seeing each other till much later in life, we were only about thirteen then, but that was when I first met her. She went in through the tail and out through the mouth and I went the opposite way. Says a lot about me really.

He had a feeling when he saw it that there would be something he could do with it, something important. But he didn't yet know what that thing was. This often happened. He would see something lying around and he would take it for himself, without thinking about what it was, what it could be used for or whether he had a need for it. Everything had a use. If it existed, it had a function and a value to someone somewhere. And even if he found that in the end he had no use for whatever the object had been designed for, he could usually find some purpose for it, even if it wasn't the purpose it was designed for.