Dear Countryside, please look up the definition of ‘path’.

The sun was up, the sky was blue, it was beautiful and so was I, and when I stopped paraphrasing Siouxsie and the Banshees (not a Beatles fan, sorry), I decided to go running over the fields.

As soon as I started lumbering running, my tooth started to hurt and it reminded me of the time I was at work and a girl there said ‘there’s nothing worse than toothache’ and when I replied with ‘people with cancer might disagree with you’ was met with a blank look as she swiftly turned round and carried on the usual bunch-of-women-in-an-office conversation about husbands, kids, food shopping and X-Factor and then I went through the first field and over the stile and in the next field standing by the gate were a load of sheep and most of them gaily skipped through the gate except for this one sheep who just stood there and so I stopped and he took a step forward and I thought he was going to go through the gate and I could follow him and so I took a step forward but then he stopped to let me go first and so I stopped to let him go first instead and it ended up in a ‘no, you go first’, ‘no YOU go first’ typically British situation and I didn’t really want to end up in a side-to-side dance on the pavement thing with a sheep and so I went through the gate first and he followed me through and I got to the next field and oh fuck, like this time last year, the farmer had furrowed his field again and I thought to myself, if there’s a sign that says ‘footpath’ the least it could do is have a fucking path on the other side of it and not twenty acres of mud and so I trudged through the mud in the general direction I thought the next stile was but I couldn’t see it and when I got over the next little bridge the next field was also all mud and I wasn’t happy and I turned round and I didn’t want to do a Plan B run as I was pissed off by then and just wanted to go back but I didn’t go back the way I came, but did a little detour along the road and as I went down the nice downhill open stretch bit there was a learner driver stopped in the road and the cars couldn’t get around it and I rubbernecked while I went past to see what was up with the driver and briefly pondered if I should stop and pretend to do my laces up so I could get a proper look but there didn’t seem to be anything up with her and she was just sitting there and not thumping her fists frustratedly on the steering wheel like I would have been if I had forgotten where the go-forward-and-stop-holding-up-the-traffic-behind-you-pedal was and I carried on running down the hill and I got home severely pissed off that my training run was scuppered by the field full of mud.