He caught up with me after about 50 yards – a man of around my own age, a little overweight, wearing a steward’s tabard and puffing as heavily as if he’d just run the London Marathon himself.
“Excuse me, sir…” he began; and then, since I showed no sign of slacking my pace, he reiterated his faux politeness: “Excuse me, sir,” then went for the shaming kill: “You behaved extremely selfishly back there…”
This was not an argument I was going to join – this was fatuity raised to the very empyrean. I merely broke stride, turned to him, and said, “I am ill, and I’m old.” He wasn’t to be dissuaded: “That was a very selfish thing that you did – and potentially dangerous…”
I stopped dead, turned to him, and said it loudly this time, and straight to his puce and punctilious face: “I am ill, and I’m old.” And frankly, if he’d bearded me a third time, I’d have undermined this assertion by clumping him: I was that pissed off.
True, if like some real-world Winston Smith, you have the temerity to turn down the volume on the telescreen, then you don’t find out that 50,000 competitors, plus about four times as many supporters, stewards, first aiders, special constables and spectators have arrived in your hometown, with the avowed intention of running around it, and thereby making it impossible for those of us who actually live here to walk from, say, Westminster Abbey to Lower Regent Street, without…
Well, without the confrontation outlined above, which occurred when, having waited for five minutes or so in an increasingly tightly packed queue of people, I realised I’d have to do exactly the same again, simply to cross another section of roadway that still had a few halt and lame competitors dressed as telephones, ducks, and stoma bags (all right, I made the last one up), hauling themselves towards the Mall and the finishing line.
So, what I did instead was lift up the bit of cord, duck under it, walk across the road, duck under a second cord and walk off up Whitehall towards Mr Sunak’s house.
Which is where the steward tried to collar me.
I’d already kvetched to another one: “Why can’t they all go run around in a field near Cirencester – I mean, Christ knows there’s enough space in this country…”
To which he’d simply replied – as if stating a tautology – “It’s the London Marathon.” Indeed, it is, and in a tight field, over the years, it has become perhaps the pre-eminent example of how, while you may not be rich enough to have the burden of your conscience relieved by giving generously to those less well-off, you can do the next best thing: be relieved of the burden of your avoirdupois instead, and in the process raise money for any number of maladies, physical and mental.
Cutting back through to Horse Guards Parade, I had a good opportunity to witness this, the 21st-century ailment army: like foot soldiers in a Samurai film, many wore rigid banners on poles attached to their back, but instead of bearing the insignia of feudal warlords, they read Child Leukaemia or Cystic Fibrosis, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (All right, I made the last one up – it was abbreviated to ADHD).
As for the composition of this, the force that would vanquish suffering for ever; well, not exclusively, but pretty white – and of course, provincial to the last carrot-cruncher. Why wouldn’t it be so? We Londoners have to run around the town all the fucking time.
Anyway, snobbish I may be, a solitary I undoubtedly am – nonetheless, the spectacle of this great host of well-meaning folk aroused in me yet more carping and cavilling. I mean, sponsored reeling, writhing and even fainting in coils has been on the increase my entire life. It has paid for vast amounts of research into cancer, and new therapies for mental illnesses.
Yet, you don’t have to be any kind of epidemiologist at all in order to note that there’s a direct correlation between the increase in the prevalence of all these maladies, and the manufacture of all those space blankets the footsore London Marathon participants drape round their sweaty shoulders as they’re helped, hobbling, to leave this field of beneficent dreams.
My late mother always said people should do sponsored looking-after-the-elderly/mentally ill/cancerous, rather than expend their energy so uselessly. But really, such a sponsorship would, if undertaken properly, constitute a sort of, gulp, welfare state.
