Last 48 hours

Colin Halsall (above), with wife Margaret and three of their five grandchildren the day after returning from watching the European Athletic Championships live in Helsinki, was one of many from the athletics fraternity attending Tynwald yesterday.

Because I have been involved in so many social events this week in support of Marie, which came "back to back" with so many other things that I have been involved with, I resigned myself to just one meaningful run this week and had to miss a couple of races. Tynwald involved driving a couple of people to the ceremony and joining the guests for coffee before being set free with the masses to take masses of photos around the fair field. I made a brief exit from the fair field to do what I always used to do with Robbie when Tynwald got a bit much f or him and walked to the top of the hill and took some photos looking down.

I then rejoined the official part of proceedings and took plenty of photos of the Tynwald members and guests. My full collection of photos is at http://isleofman.in/tynwald

We had a good scoff at the Methodist Church Hall before we left St Johns and after a brief trip into town it was an airport run, well drive really, before attending an official dinner last night.

Events of last night resulted in something I had not achieved before. My only proper run this week was a long one, the full marathon distance at 7 am this morning, which meant that I completed a marathon within 11 hours of completing more than a bottle of wine. That was followed by a "mother-in-law" drive less than an hour later when she was able to see the sights of the Isle of Man on what (for what non Manx residents might not realise) was our Queen's Jubilee Holiday - well apart from about half of the trip when we could barely see in front of ourselves due to rain and mist.

I promised myself that I would indulge in some TV sport this afternoon and not worry if the websites were not updated. I saw about five minutes of the TV before my body demanded abot three hours of sleep as compensation for the way that I have been treating it.

I saw the last part of Andy Murray's match though and kept an eye on the Diamond League match whilst trying to filter down an ever growing pile of newspapers and magazines gathered over the past few weeks.

I was trying to think of a story about interest being artificially high for the Diamond League but I thought that might produce cries of "what a load of bankers".