Obviously, one of the first things that Jack-Patrick had to do on reaching the United Kingdom was to go and see where his antecedents used to live. Here, therefore, you see me looking in one direction, his mum looking in another, his dad adjusting the buggy (complete with ‘festival wheels’) – and the dog and…
I’ll be frank. I don’t normally like babies. They are unpredictable, fragile creatures that seem to cry all the time and frighten middle aged men like me. Everything changed today, when I met my nephew for the first time. Jack-Patrick May, newly arrived with his mum and dad from Australia, is perhaps the most perfect…
Amazingly, you can watch me running (sort of) across the finish line. It’s a bit like playing ‘Where’s Wally?’, only you get the added benefit of seeing me in various stages of suffering… I’m the one in the black lycra with the baseball hat, sunglasses and ‘John’ written on his front!
My Garmin did a good job… 4:59:41, confirmed on the Paris Marathon website this evening. Just sneeked in under the 5:00 hour barrier, then. Which means I came 26245th out of 28844! There were an awful lot of people in front, but at least there were over two and a half thousand behind me!
The headlines are pretty simple. I am the proud owner of a finisher’s medal and tee shirt for this year’s Paris Marathon, having achieved a personal best by scraping in at 4 hours 59 minutes. Or at least I think that’s my time. My Garmin tells me that’s the case, but I’ll have to wait…
A lot of people have been very rude about First Great Western in the press recently, describing it as slow, inefficient, poorly managed, etc etc. I cannot comment on very much, but I can confirm that it is very slow. I am currently sitting on a train from Swansea to London, just outside Reading, where…
It rained. The wind blew. I ran. In the right weather, today’s 20 miler could have been quite fun. An undulating course took us in two loops (one of 12 miles and one of 8) through country lanes and pretty villages around Bedford.But the weather today was far from right. I knew things were going…
There you go. I did see the Matterhorn! It didn’t snow non stop all week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty dreadful, with good visibility and flat light the best we could hope for. But the sun shone on Thursday and Friday, allowing us to ski across to Zermatt and to rush down pistes that…
Cervinia is not the most beautiful of ski resorts. Its architecture is functional and in today’s cloud looked far from inspiring. But, even this late in the season, its ski runs more than make up for the lack of chocolate box views which I’ve been used to in Austria and Switzerland. And, of course, because…
