to bed. Turns out it wasn’t even ’is ’ouse. T’were ’is next door neighbours, like. To make things worse, he were sick on their cat.”“Aye. He ran a crackin’ race next day though. Knocked three seconds of t’ Commonwealth 10,000m record, as I recall

by the Creative Circle. I decided to extend the experiment: perhaps if I worked less, I might be paid more? In my new regime, I rolled into work at 11am, read the papers, pondered which restaurant most deserved my patronage at lunchtime, summoned a company cab

-eighties. In two weeks, I would be embarking on a 105-mile non-stop run across the Jordan desert with a full pack and a 62-hour deadline. And here was I, close to collapse after just 45 minutes of gentle ascent in the world’s most rapturously inviting climate

and tracks that were supposed to lead us to the ridge of the Malverns.Steeple chase: the race was run against a backdrop of villages, churches and rolling hillsI suppose propelling us up a 1:4 incline bearing 10kg rucksacks at the height of a heatwave

(yes, 54) miles, 10 milesCheckpoints and water stations roughly every six miles. It costs £749 (£786.50 by credit card) including six days of meals, tented accommodation and a hotel at the end.As RW columnist Andy Blackford said in 2003: "The MOB does

Hollywood movies. It was fine: I lived a chaste, quiet life, free from the madness and mayhem of Tinseltown.But you know how it is. Barely a week had gone by and there I was, stumbling out of Kate’s boudoir again at 11am, two hours late for my screen test

‘won’t’ as can’t. Back in the 1950s, my mother caused a scandal when she ran away with a sausage salesman from Penge. They met at a ballroom dancing class and rumba’d round the world for a year before settling in Mauritania. By this time, she

Right, now I’m getting nervous. Tomorrow I leave for French Guyana, and, as usual, I’ve left everything to the last minute. The list of kit seems to have stretched overnight.It includes 250mg of ciprofloxacin hydrochloride, 10mg of buscopan, 250mg

.“It’s me back,” muttered Big Ron. “It hasn’t been right since London.”Good Lord, someone had actually run a race! Perhaps there was hope for us yet!“You never told me you were doing the London, Ron. How did you get on?”“Not this year,” he snapped. “1996.”“1994

on the very verge of collapse.In the 1930s, it was the exuberant expression of a great dream, ‘The City Beautiful’. Now the mirrored summit of the Chrysler Building gleams like a broken promise above a grey and weary wilderness. Manhattan’s streets have