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We saved four years for the river cruise. Eleven days down the Rhine, the trip my husband and I had promised ourselves since the last of the kids left home. I paid the final instalment in March. And in April a consultant looked at my notes for six minutes and told me that at my age he'd think very hard about whether I was really up to it. I'm fifty-eight. We saved four years for that cruise. Not a figure of speech — a jar at first, then a savings account my husband started calling the Rhine fund. Eleven days on the river, the thing we'd promised each other since the last of the kids moved out. I paid the final instalment in March and had a little cry at the kitchen table doing it. And then my own body started handing the trip back before I'd even packed. It came on slowly, the way these things do. Mornings first. I'd wake at five and lie there because my hands didn't work yet, and my hips felt like they'd been set in the wrong position overnight. By the time I got downstairs I'd used up something I didn't get back. By two in the afternoon I was looking for a chair the way other people look for a coffee. I did everything you're supposed to do. I walked. I lost weight, a stone and a half, slowly and sensibly. I took the fish oil and the turmeric and a joint supplement that cost sixty-eight pounds a bottle and tasted like a hedge. I bought the memory-foam pillow and the magnesium and one of those little copper bracelets from the chemist that everyone's mother swears by. I did all of it. And I still stood at the bottom of my own stairs every morning wondering how I was going to manage a gangway and a cobbled German square for eleven days straight. So I went to see someone. Privately, because the wait otherwise was months. I sat in a nice office and a consultant looked at my notes for about six minutes. He didn't tell me I was ill. I almost wish he had. Instead he told me this was just my age now. That the stiffness and the tired mornings were wear and tear, that I should manage my expectations, and — this is the part I keep coming back to — that I should think very hard about whether I was really up to the cruise. Then his receptionist took two hundred pounds off my card and wished me a lovely holiday. I drove home and packed my suitcase anyway, out of pure stubbornness. And then I left it by the front door. For nine days it sat there, packed, while I decided whether four years of saving was about to become eleven days I couldn't physically do. That suitcase is the reason I started digging. Because I don't quit things. And it's just your age is not a diagnosis, it's a shrug. So at ten o'clock one night, with the suitcase glaring at me from the hall, I sat down with my laptop and I didn't search why am I tired. I searched everything at once — stiff hands in the morning, no stamina by mid-afternoon, poor circulation, sleeping badly, waking up feeling folded up wrong. Not as separate problems. As one thing. And I fell down a hole I didn't climb out of until nearly three in the morning. What I kept coming back to was copper. Not as folk medicine, but as something with actual history behind it, research going back decades that sits in journals and goes nowhere. And the reason it goes nowhere is almost funny once you see it. You can't patent a metal. There isn't a company on earth that can own copper, so there's no money to market it, no rep taking a consultant to lunch to mention it. It just sits there, unpromoted, while everyone gets sold the thing that has an owner. Which is when I understood what had gone wrong with the little bracelet from the chemist. I'd worn one. It did nothing. So I'd written the whole idea off, same as you probably have. But I looked mine up that night and it wasn't copper. It was plated brass, a cheap base metal with a copper wash sprayed over the top, so thin that almost nothing actually touches your skin. That's the trick. They sell you the word copper, you feel nothing, you decide the whole thing is nonsense, and you were never wearing copper in the first place. I ordered a proper one that night. Solid copper, hand-hammered, heavy in a way the chemist one never was. It was, honestly, my last stubborn act before giving in and cancelling. Here's where I have to be fair, because I didn't believe it either. The first week, nothing I'd swear to in court. A slightly easier morning. I told myself it was the weather. But by the end of the second week I noticed I'd stopped looking for the chair at two o'clock. And I got so suspicious of myself, so sure I was imagining it to justify the money, that I took the thing off for nine days on purpose, to prove it was nonsense. By the fourth day the mornings were bad again. By the sixth I was back to lying there waiting for my hands. By the ninth I put it back on feeling slightly stupid, and inside three days I was myself again. I've never taken it off since. We went on the cruise. I did the gangway. I did the cobbles. I did a market square in Rüdesheim and a hill up to a castle that my husband, who is two years younger and insists nothing is wrong with him, had to stop halfway up. Week one home, I slept through the night. A month in, I threw out the sixty-eight-pound joint supplement I'd been rationing. Four months in, my daughter asked what I was doing, in the tone you'd use about a facelift. And the suitcase, the one that sat packed by the door for nine days going nowhere, is back down from the loft. I brought it in last week to start packing for the next one. The copper is Vera's. I found her almost by accident, a name a woman in a forum had written on the back of what looked like a photographed receipt. She's been hammering the pieces by hand in her workshop since the eighties and doesn't advertise like a company because she isn't one. She'll send you one to try for thirty days. If it does nothing for your mornings, your hands, your stamina, you send it back and she refunds every penny. There's a simpler test than that, even. Hold a magnet to it when it arrives. If the magnet sticks, it's plated brass and you were about to be robbed again, so send it straight back. Real copper won't hold a magnet at all. A little over sixty thousand women are wearing hers now. I'm one of them, and I nearly cancelled the trip I'd saved four years for because a man in a nice office told me sixty was just something I had to accept. It wasn't. Hold the magnet to it and see for yourself.