Meenzer

CT'd your post

You leave your stuff at the start - there's 20-odd double-decker buses lined up along Claremont Road for dropping off your bags etc. - and pick it up again from the same bus at the finish. It's all very efficient, as you'd expect after all this time I suppose.

You'd better not, since last year my legs did exactly what you described in your initial post and stopped working at around the halfway point. A not very noble 2:37 after 1:10 at halfway, with a "must train better" badge for next time - Jill must have passed me at some point, since I know she started in a later group, though she was good enough not to issue a Nelson-style "HA-HA" along the way. Anyway, getting back at the end really isn't all that bad. The buses (not free, unless I allowed someone to take a couple of quid off me for no good reason) are frequent and, once they get past the initial crush at Shields, pretty speedy. I finished at 2pm or so and managed to queue up, board, get to Haymarket, call my old man, get ferried back to Gosforth, shower, change and get to Central Station in good time for the 4pm train to London and a friend's wedding dinner the same evening. No need for emergency bean-smeared naans along the way.

(And we all knew the number of players/abandonment one from repeatedly trying to kick the ball out of the keeper's hands on PS1 FIFA, right?)

7/12, and aye, annoying that it doesn't tell you the right answers

Pity he didn't bother for their goal.

Aye, who'd have thought one of their two forwards would score? That's eerie.

http://www.itv.com/news/update/2012-11-11/man-arrested-after-posting-burning-poppy-online/

Omm nom fucking nom. Many's the time I've offered Brock a position as our houseboy, but to no avail.

Honey, I know you don't approve of actual evidence, but I have plenty of it to confirm Renton's heterosexuality. He's far too sensible to be gay, for one thing. You, on the other hand, bring up his supposed gayness at every available opportunity. When American nutjob fundamentalists do that to their rivals, it's invaribly because they secretly enjoy the taste of man-cock in grubby toilet stalls. So is there something you should be telling us, "wolfy"?

I don't remember that, but I'm starting to suspect CT might.

It's hard to know whether you were being serious or not, you were reeling from the shock of finding gay people in a gay bar at the time.

You should have said something, I'd've taken you to G-A-Y Bar and given you a couple of quid to play with the video jukebox. Instant happiness.

AFAIK I've not done any telly since a Eurovision edition of the Really Useful Show in 1997, so your memory would have to be going great guns to still have me on its radar (particularly since I understand you were still a high-flying executive type at that point, hence marginally less of a daytime TV watcher). And the nearest I'll have come to your porn collection (so to speak) is getting as far as the bedroom of the tried-and-tested Gosforth slapper when I was 17 then fleeing ASAP when it clearly wasn't going to happen. You weren't hovering near the end of the Great North Run last year, hoping to pick up my custom as I stumbled towards a bus to Haymarket?

We're all supposed to take it up the arse according to you, so I wouldn't give that a great deal of credence. But aye, in hindsight I might have opted for something other than M&S Outlet's finest.

I've never denied it! Even I draw the line at cheesy bean soup though.

It is.

Aurgh.

Fucking hell Alex, has nobody bit yet? Including the Beansmeister General himself

Aye

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/nov/04/jessica-ennis-interview

He's a thorough cath-word too. If I implied otherwise, I certainly didn't mean to.