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for them to represent Morgan Sachs against Goldman Waterhouse in this year’s Pork
Belly Futures Marathon – and they will, at the very least, scream and shout and throw their half-eaten bananas at you, or, at the very most, fly somersaulting off your nearside wing and make
a nasty dent in your no-claims bonus.
    Nor are the odds against their running into you any longer if you stay indoors. You will be on the easeful point, perhaps, of uncorking a little light lunch, when the doorbell rings, dragging
you from your ottoman to a front step on which a man in a steaming vest is hopping up and down, either rattling a tin or waving a clipboard and pen. If it is the one with a tin, he is running from
Potters Bar to Croydon and wants his money now, if it is the one with a clipboard and pen, he will be running from Croydon to Potters Bar next Tuesday and wants to come back for his money after
he’s done it.
    Yes, yes, I know, don’t go snatching up your own pen, I do realise it isn’t his money, it will all go to charity, but that’s not the point. The point is that though marathons
may be useful in raising funds, they are useless in themselves: Pheidippides was not just the first man with a good reason to run 26 miles and 385 yards, he was also the last. All the modern
marathon does is encourage its hapless fans to pant themselves purple for hundreds of hours, because – let us not beat about the bush, which, indeed, many of them are dressed as – they
enjoy it. By that token, I could stand in Oxford Street buttonholing shoppers with the news that I had just watched
Friends
in aid of the RSPCA, see this tin, please dig deep, or go
(slowly) round with a clipboard and pen begging the doorstepped to support my attempt, next Tuesday, to eat a kilo of caviar for Oxfam – which I could do without getting in anyone’s way
or frightening the horses. Moreover, lest you think me less than selfless, I’d be perfectly happy to do it in a luminous thong and antlers.

Suffer Little Children
    Y ES , of course today’s farrago is going to be about children no longer falling out of trees. You know the way I work:
within seconds of my clocking what the NHS sees as this wonderful news in Monday’s papers, my trouser leg was rolled up and my finger running along my shin and down the arches of the years.
To end up, as you see, on my keyboard.
    It’s a knobbly johnny, this shin, and distinguishes me from Proust in that I do not need to dunk it in my tea to summon up the past: touching it, I touch again the just-plucked conkers in
my plummeting grasp as Cecil Road leaps up to break me, I smell the sheets of Southgate Hospital, I hear the crackle of the nursing starch, I feel the itch beneath the plaster tube, all that.
    I can call up this nostalgic stuff from almost anywhere: my whole body is a monument to risky youth. See that scar over my eye? A cocoa wound. What you did was, you emptied the cocoa tin,
punched a pin-prick in its bottom, put your thumb over the hole to prevent the coal-gas you’d filled the tin with from escaping, ran into the garden, put the tin on the wall, backed off, then
threw a flaming ball of paper at it, so that it could fragment like a hand-grenade and slice off enough of your face to merit six stitches.
    See this scar in my left palm? Mobile phone wound. In 1950? All right, cocoa. What you did was, you emptied the cocoa tin, punched a pin-prick in its bottom, and threaded fifty yards of string
through to attach to David Bunyan’s cocoa tin at Number 16, making, once you’d leant out of your two windows and stretched the string taut, two mobile phones. The tauter you stretched
it, the better the reception. Until one mobile phone flew from your hand and went through your father’s greenhouse roof, enabling you to retrieve it for hardly more than six stitches.
    The scar in my right palm? How you punched holes in cocoa tins was with a jack-knife: to do it, you unfolded the spike for taking stones