I ran 5000 metres on a running track in 14 minutes and 34 seconds,
a personal best by a country mile, but I didn't really enjoy
the cut and thrust of track and field, preferring the road and those fell races
where I could race down a gradual descent, leaping like a stag over rock and stile.

I liked to pretend I could mix it with the ‘tough men of the fells’, and pick up easy prizes.

Which is what I did the day I raced over Stoodley Pike.

Afterwards, having missed out on a first prize due to my lack of strength on the climb,
an old Gypsy woman stood watching me put on my trousers.

She declared, ‘Ah, you took the easy option,
when you should have been at the open meeting, doing the 3,000metres.

‘You should concentrate on lowering your middle-distance times.

'Why, your coach always said you’d no discipline.’

‘Which is true, and, desiring a better life than I could provide in my caravan,
you left Erin’s Isle for the shores of Albion.

‘But now, as the chief attraction of Murgatroyd’s Travelling Fair,
fate has led me to West Yorkshire’s Pennines.

‘I’ve followed your athletic progress with interest,
and you can’t half shift, like a startled hare.’

Then she looked at me and her smile faded, and prophesised,
‘There will come a time when you’re are no longer as fit as a butcher’s dog,
and will enter a seedy world far from these shores,
like a Victorian criminal in those novels you liked to read, hugging the London smog.’

‘In years to come you will blossom, as a chatter-up of women,
but your old pals will categorise you as another in their long list of mighty bores.

‘But beware a scantily-clad femme fatale clad in cut-price bling.’

A fellow athlete said to me, ‘Was that your mum?’

‘Gawd, no!’ I expostulated, embarrassed.

‘She’s a ‘Gyppo’ woman.’

Many years later I thought of this prophecy while lounging in a Florida hotel,
a favourite haunt of movie moguls, aged porn stars and plastic surgeons,
a refuge for the makers of fakery, and cried.

The wife asked, jingling her cheap sparklers, which she wore even while in a bikini,
‘What’s the matter, darling?’

‘I’ve got all that a man desires,’ I sobbed, ‘but I’m old and fat,
and can no longer run up and down that pike called Stoodley.

‘But in those days I was competing with genuine people, and I left my heart on a Yorkshire hill.

‘Now I realise there’s more to life than sun lounging with an old Hollywood flop,
who looks ridiculous in a bikini.

‘So, drink up and move out, you’ve had your fill!’

Then she slapped me very hard, spilling her Martini.

But I bravely continued, ‘I’ve been living a lie – for instance,
remember the couple I introduced as my parents at our wedding in the Hollywood hills?

‘Well, they were masquerading at my expense.

‘A music hall act, known as Pop up Percy and Disappearing Polly, they dazzled with sleight of hand,
but came quite cheap, if you booked them with a band.’

My lounging marital partner looked surprised, ‘Oh them, they’re on stage here tonight.’

‘Are they? Oh, what a coincidence.

‘Well, Percy had a reputation as a pickpocket, which got him a bad name on the cabaret circuit.

‘Indeed, some witty scribe writing in the Magician’s Monthly referred
to them as Polly And Percy Hides the Disappearing Pence.

'Which was ironic as, looking back at the first stanza, you’ll know my early life, like theirs,
was also marked by pretence.

‘So, you’re a fraud!’ The irate missus shouted.

‘You didn’t mind me making millions of bucks, writing scripts for naughty skin flicks,’
I countered, ‘back in those non-PC days.'

‘I based them on those tales you told me of your early movie roles.’

‘Well,’ she screamed, ‘Your scripts were full of posh ladies wearing corsets and stays.’

‘And you’re a snob,’ I countered, ‘known as the diva of hotel swimming pools.

‘Like now, showing your wealth off in this exclusive hotel in Miami.’

Then onto the poolside came an old woman, and I trembled with shock,
recalling the day of my birth when the nurse had slapped by bottom.

Years later I felt life was coming full circle as I legged it down a hill, 
as poor as a church mouse, for that bleeding Percy had picked my pocket.

I hid as the old woman walked over to my startled wife, saying, ‘Hello, I’m his mammy.’

(I attached the old result sheet, not to show off, but to prove it's not all literary licence.)