To be brutually honest, I haven’t bought a block of wax for about 30 years, so when the last rub of the last block of something that comes attached to a little plastic cap began to scratch the deck rather than wax it, I went into a mild panic, throwing stuff around the garage and emptying boxes of fin screws and instant repair kits gone hard. There had to be another few blocks of comped stock somewhere!

But no. Nada. Zilch. There was a principle at stake here, so checking the calendar and the depth of wax cover on the couple of boards I ride, I realised I could probably fudge it through to the next free wax opportunity, the Noosa festival of Surfing in March. So out came the wax combs.

I can hear what you’re saying out there, reader: for Christ’s sake, Phil, go and support your local surf shop with a couple of bucks over the counter! But my aversion to supporting the commercialisation of traction goes back a long, long way, to the days when a filthy great rectangular slab of paraffin wax cost 20 cents at the hardware shop, and you could melt it down in one of mum’s big casserole saucepans (and jeez, didn’t she love that!) over the Hotpoint stove, maybe throw in a secret additive or two to make it softer, or smell nicer, then pour it into about a dozen paper cups.

Bingo! A summer’s worth of wax. Back in the ‘60s some blokes got quite good at this – like Mike Doyle, Rusty Miller and Garth Murphy at Surf Research – and inevitably the consumer wax revolution blossomed until the arrival of Slipcheck and Gripfeet, two aerosols of (probably) highly toxic, sand-blasted tarmac mix guaranteed to rip holes in your chest and knees. I tried both, but until 1970, when working, surfing and binge drinking began to fully commandeer my time, I stuck with hardware shop paraffin and mum’s saucepan.

In the many years since, we’ve seen wax substitutes come and go, and I’m sure my reader will have his favourites, but nothing had captured my attention so dramatically as a French product called Lick Liquid Surfwax, which came into my life just as I combed my deck and nothing happened. Down to rock bottom again, as Jimmy would say. The packaging says that it’s biodegradable, non-toxic and – wait for it – sticky. You apply it by dribbling a little across the deck, then carding it back and forth in a manner that will pleasantly remind old timers of late nights and toilet seats.

The nice distributors sent me a tube to try, and when I buggered it up by putting too much on, they came around to my house and applied it properly. Then I went surfing.

The verdict? Well, the jury is still out on this one. It’s sticky, but not in a nice way – more like lying on a tiled floor after a playgroup luncheon for three-year-olds. It kind of works, but it’s clear, so don’t look down as you pull into a double overhead reefie: oh my god, I forgot to wax my board!

I could get used to it, or I could go back to my roots. If Bunnings still sell paraffin and mum can remember where she stored her saucepans, that is. //PHIL JARRATT