‘I have a badly scalded wrist’
‘Why should that stop you running, Roper? You don’t run with your hands, boy!
'In my defence, sir, the injury made me indolent, I felt as if not just my epidermis but my very soul had been torn from me’.
‘Very well. But get in that cold shower.'
And so on…I was back to my schooldays. My wrist is healing, and last Wednesday I managed a bit of a club run with the Seaford Striders. I lasted for two miles before I threw in the towel. On Sunday I decided to attempt four miles over Seaford Head. And, oh, the weather. I left it till four o’clock to run, by which time it was crepuscular, a winter Sunday afternoon when we would drive across the fens to Ely for crumpets with great-aunt Ada. Up onto Seaford Head, down to Hope Gap and up again. When I reached the top, it was as if I had plodded into a Turner canvas, a boiling sea, huge clouds, black, grey, navy blue, and, the oddest thing, a sudden flash of pink above me as the setting sun struck some clouds thousands of feet above me. If J.M.W Turner were with me, he would have had himself lashed to a tree ignored to paint me.
