At eighty my stomach grew so large my family got frightened. The scan found something — and then a twelve-year-old record with my late husband’s name on it, and a folder called PROJECT AGNES.

Once a year. At a clinic off the Belgrave road in Marren. A car would come and fetch me and bring me back.

He made a joke about it. Something about the company finally doing something useful.

I remember being pleased. I remember being slightly smug about it.

And I remember standing in the porch of that church and telling four separate women that insurance companies were not all bad.

I went every year for eleven years.

A perfectly nice building with a car park and a coffee machine.

A blood test. Blood pressure. And a scan of my middle that took about twenty minutes, in a dim room, with a young woman who did not say anything.

I used to find it boring. I used to take a book.

Nobody ever told me anything was wrong because nothing ever was.

And that is exactly what a longitudinal cohort study looks like from the inside. It looks like nothing at all happening, every year, for eleven years.