Still, it isn’t all bad. After a regime of pissy teas and unending fruit for the past few months, for the coming few days, and during the event, I can eat anything I like, and as much of it as I want. Chocolate biscuits, dozens of them, cream on my cereal – yes, that’s cream on cereal, it's called fat-loading – burgers than glisten, chips suppurating in fat.  For a few days I can be replete...

With Borzov we're talking about the movement of skin and miniature amounts of sub-cutaneous fat. Now picture a face-on view of Mr Lard-arse, all 100kg of him, barreling his way through the park. Ruction is hardly the word. It's something seismic more like. With each slow-motion thump of my heel striking the ground a cataclysmic wave is sent up through my body and all my extraneous blubber bounces and flails under my skin. Eeeuch! It's almost too horrible to contemplate.

So, the hunt for my running shoes…. I learn from her ladyship that they were consigned to the garden shed long ago. I march out into the garden, across our postage stamp-sized lawn. Just opening the shed door causes an avalanche … of garden implements, bicycles, plant pots and skittering packets of seeds. Does everyone else in this country have as much extraneous stuff? Eventually I locate my trainers under a rake behind a bag of charcoal. And there, happily installed, I also find a family of field mice, four furry rodents in bucolic bliss, lolling on their backs and munching lazily on stalks of grass. They look at me doubtfully.