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matter up the sharp end in Lewisham, there is more to poppying out here than bull and bloody blanco. Me and Nobby and Chalky watched her skedaddle, and we gave a bit of a cheer,
and then Nobby took my feet and Chalky held me under the arms, and they carried me past a number of material witnesses into the Rat and Cockle, and Chalky went off to get them in, and Nobby lit a
fag and put it in my mouth, and he said: ‘Could have been worse, mate – suppose it had been her what had stuck it in Chalky? He would have been pushing up daisies by now.’
    ‘She might have got both of you,’ I said. Nobby shook his head. ‘No chance. One of ’em tried once, caught me off guard, took a quid off of me and before I could stop her
she had shoved a pin straight through my lapel. It might have done me serious mischief if it wasn’t for the Bible I always keep in my breast-pocket. I found it in a hotel bedroom, you
know.’
    ‘Bloody lucky,’ I said. ‘It could so easily have been a towel.’
    ‘Or a rubber shower-mat,’ said Chalky, setting down the drinks.
    ‘A man needs a bit of luck,’ said Nobby, ‘out here.’

See How They Run
    I T is a sobering thought – unless you tied on something so celebratory last night as to leave you squinting at this
through one throbbing eye, in which case a raw egg in a quart of espresso would doubtless serve you better – that if Athens had been only a mile down the road as Pheidippides flew, you would
have had nothing to celebrate, since Sir Ranulph Fiennes would have spent last week at home with his feet up, watching
Countdown
. He would not have been blistering those feet around the
world, 26 miles and 385 yards at a time, in his madcap triumph of running a marathon on seven continents in seven days, because there would be no such thing as a marathon.
    He is not the first person to be have been driven nuts by this poxy event: click on almost any channel at almost any time, and chances are you will see thousands gasping through Wigan or
Amarillo or Ulan Bator, variously got up as Napoleon and King Kong and Donald Duck and sucking on Volvic teats, while night begins to fold them in soft wings, because many hours have passed since
the winner breasted the tape and went off to sign fat contracts with Lucozade or Nike. No other athletics’ contest attracts losers the way the marathon does: you will not see spindly men in
George Bush masks and sequinned tutus queuing up to put the shot a tad further, with any luck, than their toe, nor diving-suited crackpots trying to pole-vault a bar challengingly set at three
inches, nor pantomime horses containing two fat grannies lumbering asymmetrically towards a sandpit for what might just become the sextuple jump, if they ever get there alive. But convene a
marathon, and anything goes; for the most part slowly, and too often facetiously.
    Yet worse – because, when it is merely a telly being plodded across, we idling pizza-gobblers may staunch our couchbound guilt with a swift athletic jab on the remote – is that
real-life full-size marathoners are all out there, all the time, obsessively training in the pitiably inextinguishable hope of, someday, coming in 963rd. You cannot, these days, take an
unobstructed stroll down any street: be sure that something wet and wheezing will either be clumping towards you, forcing you aside (since it cannot deviate, for fear of knocking a precious
nano-second off its eight-hour target), or, far horribler, invisibly panting up behind you on thumping feet, forcing you to wonder whether there’s enough time to swallow your mobile and
disappear your wallet between your trembling buttocks before the lead pipe falls.
    Even if you’re not on the pavement but sealed in your car, they are still unavoidable. Try to ignore them as they suddenly spring out from the kerb – because jogging on the spot at
the red light might ruin their chance of getting back to the office clock in the qualifying time required