Three weeks in

It's now three weeks since I restarted running, and this morning's run was my longest so far, all of 3.5km. It was quite hard work - I don't know if this was due to the muggy heat (even at 8am), or the amount of wine I'd drunk at Tim's barbecue the previous evening, or just general tiredness after quite a sweaty night. I was at least cheered on my way by a passerby, who from her general demeanour seemed to be on her way home from a particularly raucous all-night party. She appeared to be wearing wellington boots and fishnet stockings, an odd combination for a summer morning, but I only saw her from the other side of Gilbert Road and I wasn't going to cross over for a closer look, so I might have been mistaken.

Cambridge is in the grip of World Cup fever to a quite remarkable extent. At our house we don't have a television ("Are they poor?", a visiting friend's child apparently asked), and international football matches are about the only event that I arrange to go and watch somewhere else. As I was walking over to my father-in-law's, it seemed that every passing car had an England flag fluttering from it, houses were draped all around, and the streets were full of entire families dressed in England strip, no doubt on their way round to some friend or relative's house to watch the match. Later on, after England's rather unconvincing 1-0 victory over Paraguay, the city centre was full of fans, and the area around the big screen on Parker's Piece looked like a battlefield might after a lengthy struggle between two opposing forces armed only with beer cans. Four weeks to go.