So it was a complete surprise to tear a muscle in my arse so badly that I thought I'd scuppered the race, still a week away, and I spent the next four days in gluteus maximus hell, but the run itself can await its own telling.
I got these shots before the ill-starred run and before the rapid melt set in.
On limping home, behind the cobrador for once, it was pretty obvious that we could make the drive down to Bury St Edmunds for the Easter feast at Jules' place, which I really didn't want to miss, as it was to be the first reunion of the old India hands, and the rolling out to the wider family of the wonders of Gin & Mango.
In fact, the severe snow coverage was only in remote North Lincolnshire and west of Bury, so the drive was easy and relaxed. Parties at Jules' are always great, and the craic was 90 (I have traced the origins of that peculiar phrase, and one theory was that it originated in the Isle of Man, and not in the Ireland that claims it), even for someone four and a half weeks into the alcohol deprivation of a delayed Lent. We went for the obligatory walk around Icklingham village in a bitingly cold wind and got these snaps.
Then it was lift-off early doors, as we had promised Ellie her birthday nosh-up in a restaurant of her choice, and she predictably chose Damon's, an upmarket burger joint on the Lincoln bypass, popular with the youth of the area and other lovers of predigested food. I love going there, but for anthropological and musical reasons, and certainly not for the disappointment of being told that the fella on the next table just ordered the last lobster, as I was all for ordering steak just to get a sharp knife to poke him in the eye. People's table manners fascinate me, and I wonder why. My late father, a man widely respected as being able to mount a spirited counter-argument to any reasonable opinion, passed on to me his firm belief that food should be loaded and unloaded in private.
Does anyone remember that wonderful play on the telly called 'John Fothergill'? Himself was played brilliantly, as ever, by Robert Hardy, as the restaurateur of that nosh-house in Thame that featured in Brideshead where Anthony B-b-b-b-lanche attempted the seduction of Charles Ryder. The line I remember vividly was Fothergill showing off to one of the glitterati by instructing his waitress to overcharge customers by a shilling if she considered them to be ugly. The scene of corpulent farmers trenching down plain fare on market day made a fitting backdrop.
The musical reason is attached to the anthropological in that it is so surprising that we all have a birthday every 365 days, and we're damn well going to go out and eat burgers and sing about it! Which brings me onto the musical content in that miserable dirge, because in a reasonably large gathering, not only do all twelve notes feature simultaneously, but there are half and quarter tones in the cacophonous farting. Then, after the atonal row during which at least half the choir forget the name of the stupid sod celebrating their epiphany, there is that awful wail that started life as 'hurrah!' and has been corrupted to the drunken belch we are subjected to today. And if that spectacle was enough, the 'management' turn it into a son et lumiere by prodding some poor sap of a waiter into the throng bearing a Swiss Roll with a sparkler in it! Strike a light!
Perhaps you are forming an opinion that I'm not a fan of ingestion as a team sport. Suffice to say it was someone with a far sharper wit than I who proclaimed the ugliest word in the English language to be 'burger'.
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