Afternoon:
10°c
On and on and on it goes, yard after yard, mile after mile, minute after insufferable minute, the boredom relentless, the pain remorseless, every split second an ordeal by excruciation.
I have no idea what it must be like to run the London Marathon but if it's one tenth as gruesome an experience as watching it on telly, it must be hell on earth.
To any of you who ran yesterday, heartfelt and sincere congratulations. Whether it was for the masochistic pleasure or for charity, or both, yours was a splendid feat.
Less magnificent than mine, not to be falsely modest, in enduring five unbroken hours of the BBC's mawkish, simpering, cliche-ridden drivel, but splendid all the same.
This was such torture that long before halfway I caught myself fantasising about choosing between any more of this and a session in Lawrence Olivier's Marathon Man dentist chair.
Narrowly, I plumped for the Beeb. Had the imbecilic interviews with facetiously dressed charity runners been conducted by Garth Crooks, it would have gone the other way.
But in a Crooks-free equation, the Beeb had this one decisive edge: one thing you cannot enjoy while having your un-anaesthetised mouth drilled by a fugitive Nazi is the sight of Gordon Ramsay stopping in distress at a green traffic light (a driving test refresher course seems indicated there) with several miles to go.
If the vision of Gordon hitting the wall was the clear highlight, there were other consolations.
Central London looked utterly gorgeous in this extended tourist film, and the overhead shots of bank HQs glimmering in the spring sun were a poignant reminder of less anxious times.
It was also a delight to hear Katie Price, whose husband Peter Andre had touchingly printed 'JADE' in felt tip on his arm, inform Sue Barker "I need all the support I can get". Whoever thought to hear those words from Jordan in a non-mammary context?
Hats off also to Mara Yamauchi, ably deputising for the injured Paula Radcliffe, for her second place in the women's "elite" race.
Dear old Brendan Foster felt she wasn't receiving proper crowd support because no one realised that she's British, though with a surname like hers (she's one of the Gloucestershire Yamauchis) it's hard to imagine why.
Lastly on the plus side, there was something undeniably stirring about the vision of that vividly multicoloured mass of runners joyously setting out on the 26 and a bit mile journey.
Even so, the words that came to mind, as always when exposed to a big city marathon, belong to Jerry Seinfeld.
"What's to see?" he asks a friend who wishes they were nearer the New York race's finish line. "A woman from Norway, a guy from Kenya, and 20,000 losers."
That line may be from a 1991 episode of history's most popular sitcom, but change Norway to Germany and upgrade the number to 36,000, and that analysis held good yesterday.
I know I'm supposed to trot out the line that everyone who took part is a winner, and in a philanthropic/personal achievement sense it's true.
But this is a sports page, and the great, savage beauty of sport is that there can only be one winner. In this case Kenya's Olympic champ Sammy Wanjiru (left) in the men's event, and Irina Mikitenko, from Germany, in the women's.
Long after the pair had showered off and replaced the lost electrolytes, the fun runners were ploughing doughtily on, or as doughtily as the BBC's roadside pinheads would allow.
A woman on stilts was one interviewee, a man dressed as a baby another. Big Jim, 73 years old, spoke silently for us all when, mid-question and without a word of apology, he abruptly resumed racing. We never learnt if he finished, or whether any of the costume wearers' world record attempts excitedly trailed by Sue - superhero, animal, film character, swine flu spore, etc - were successful.
We might guess that the world best for a vegetable fell to a runner bean, but with the McWhirter brothers long gone we may never know for sure.
Nor do we care. Just as with Everest, whose peak is to receive a mobile telephone mast so that those who climb it can ring home with the news, the mystique of the marathon died long ago when it became clear that anyone averagely and reasonably fit can do it.
With the aid of several oxygen canisters, the Holby City crash team, a gang of Sedan chair-bearers and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, I could probably manage it myself. And if it's the only way to escape having to watch it for work again, I probably will.
