Dartmoor. 6.30am. Pitch black. We fumbled with our headtorches in the car park. The air was heavy with the autumnal fragrance of wet peat and purple heather. An invisible stream gurgled beneath a ghostly stone bridge. The shrouds of mist parted momentarily to reveal a few scatter...

adventure on which I was about to embark. There on the misty horizon of my dreams beckoned Royston. What serpentine byways awaited me out there in the uncharted wilderness of South Cambridgeshire? There has always been a bit of a wild man in me.Just like

, fit, young. If he’d beaten me in his first marathon, I’d have had to saw my own head off.As for the others, Denise, after weeks of training through a knee injury, managed a good time, and counts her first marathon among the great adventures of her life

with memories unclouded by lager and Class-A drugs may recall that this Old Etonian ex-tank-commanding erstwhile stockbroker turned trans-continental horserider accompanied me on the Long Day of my Saharan adventure. Surely he, of all people, would be up for a

down in the quest for alum – an all-purpose Philosopher’s Stone, used in the 19th Century for absolutely everything. The alum secret was stolen from the Chinese by Italian merchant adventurers – then from the Italians by Yorkshiremen. Why was it so

serves three varieties of lager. The first is the sort favoured by adventurous spinsters between visits to National Trust gardens in the Home Counties and invariably served in halves with a lemonade top. The second is a decent brew, chemically speaking

felt nauseous at the end of a run, but on this occasion I managed to throw up at the start line. As many of you will recall (with a patient sigh, no doubt), one of my many rib-fracturing incidents occurred shortly before my first big adventure run