No, honestly, I mean it. Really. The apparent physiological differences between her and SMG number in the low, possibly single-digit, percentages.

Yes indeed, to come up with an observation like that, I have been down the pub. Two of them in fact, one local, and the other almost-as-local. A short step from each other. A stagger. A waltz. I felt that after the 2100-odd miles of Suntour 2004 I deserved some manner of celebration, and this evening is the first when my elbows have been up to the effort of going out.

If you don’t understand why, imagine trying to do pull-ups each day, every day, for 8 hours, for six days straight, into the teeth of a 60MPH gale.

That’s why my elbows are shot.

My village is full of characters. The cricket pitch is one of them. The eldest. Indeed, one of the oldest cricket pitches in the world, it exists hand in hand with one of the oldest cricket clubs in the world, predating more mundane events or entities such the Napoleonic wars, the Electric Lightbulb, or the United States of America. Every weekend the locals congregate to cheer the team and sup the sacramental beer, while priest-like groundsmen frown at those who deign to walk on the pitch, player, public or otherwise.

Buffy the Bar-Tender works in the pub just off the green.

Excuse me, my cat Suzi is just hunting a moth, and I suspect will soon be eating it with an expression of great disgust on her face. It’s pointless to try and stop her, alas.

There are others – there’s Paul[1], to the best of my knowledge a truly lovely guy. Short, stocky, a chirpy local jack-the-lad-about-town, his girlfriend recently broke up with him not least because he gets drunk and passes out in fits, because of the brain tumour that is gradually killing him. He doesn’t admit to his situation when he’s sober, of course, and I suspect does not remember having told me what’s actually wrong.

I keep mum. Play stupid. At least that comes naturally.

Brad – my American colleague with whom I recently rode around Normandy – got to know Paul well from our carrying him home out of the ditch where he’d collapsed in a fit, Brad keeping him sentient and sobering him up by arguing the cubic-inch capacities of 1950s/60s-era American fins-and-chrome supercars; not that I am a judge, but I gather they both did rather well in their mutual popquiz.

This evening I met Justine and Terry; in fact, “met” is probably the wrong word. For the first half of the evening Justine entertained the other pub regulars with Broadway-esque renditions of popular songs. It would have been hard to not acknowledge her existence. Barely a few hours later, I sat in the lower public bar, flicking idly through the pages of the MP3 jukebox, only to be bounced upon by her tiddly self, followed by Terry, her butcher apparent, wet, mildly drunk and proprietorial boyfriend.

(boing) hello sorry to bother you we want to put some music on the jukebox something fun and bouncy and which everyone can sing along to i’m justine by the way / hello i’m terry / hello justine hello terry i’m alec what do you do / i’m a butcher / what locally / a few miles up the road / oh you must be at graves’ / how do you work this thing / what are you looking for / singalong music / such as / anything good, really

…leading to several minutes of being the only one adequately sober enough (amongst three) to work out how to drive the user interface, followed by a litany of Queen, Coldplay, Beatles and Bobby Darin singing Mack the Knife.

There’s a thought for a SunLabs project – Java APIs for user-interfaces which are not merely droolproof, but also which can still be comprehended and operated when the user is out of their skull on lager. Terry stopped in the public bar like some sort of Jack Davenport character – mild, pleasant, feckless – whilst Justine headed for the loos. 30 minutes later I likewise headed for the other bar to find her chatting to its other, older denizens, without a care in the world.

I made no excuses, left, and came home.

[1] some names changed. reason self-evident.