When I was a boy, on an idyllic summer afternoon, I would finish school and come home to tea in the garden with some kittens on the table. If it was a Thursday, when my father had no evening surgery, then we might borrow a punt, owned by one of his patients and lavishly appointed, and go for a trip up the Cam, and a swim.
This evening was as close as it's possible to get to those afternoons of childhood. I arrived home and ran at about 6.45 p.m. but the sun was still high in the sky. I ran a short, two-mile course, to the Martello Tower and back. After a day in a roof space smelling of sewage, it was a liberation.
