Sophia left me a small and intricately carved wooden box made of teak and which has the look of an object that has been around for quite sometime. She whispered something Mexican into my ear as she pressed it into my palm by the departure gate. As switched on as ever she forgot that I still do not speak a word of her native tongue. Or it occurs to me now, as I sit in front of the fire with a glass of fine red wine not far from my grasp and ponder the box in my hand, that perhaps I was not meant to comprehend what she said. My pleasure-gorged mind is suddenly swimming with romantic and cataclysmic possibilities. Perhaps she whispered a spell that had been passed down in her family for generations, which her grandmother had taught her mother and which Sophia learnt at her knee as well and now used it for some arcane purpose and in the box was the tooth of a pterodactyl. Perhaps, akin to an witch-doctor in the heights of a rhythmical and funky-root enhanced trance who sees the future, Sophia had seen mine as she topped the breathtaking heights of sexual ecstasy and then gave me a charm that would protect Her Guy against whatever evil she knew he would have to face. Maybe, as she saw the custom officials at the airport she suddenly remembered her stash box and the fact that it was still half full of that seriously mind bending cocaine, heroin and pcp mix, which she immediately laid on me and swore jealously into my ear that I’d best enjoy it. Christ, thinking about it, I hope it is drugs. I said I’d run that half marathon tomorrow, sponsored by the whole village to raise money for the new clock face of the church, and in my present state they’d be lucky to get sufficient cash for a digital wristwatch.

"Bruce Campbell, stricken by a heart attack ten yards from the start line leaves entire fortune to Donkey Sanctuary and raises ten pence for church clock.”

With plenty of speedballs I’m pretty sure I could make the ten miles. Especially if I was driving.