The Mildly Mad Magistrate

Friday February 13, 8am: Day 44.

Let me introduce Matt The Mildly Mad Magistrate.

Not, I admit, a particularly accurate sobriquet. Matt is not yet a magistrate and he is not mildly insane either. He is totally so.

Matt – who I last met aged 13-and-a-half, until, that is, he turned up on my doorstep the other day as a Friend Reunited – has arguably out-resolved the rest of TRSNYRC by a fair distance.

He does, to be honest, have time on his hands after retiring early.

He also, however, has Go-For-It. Particularly for a man needing a kidney transplant and with knackered hips.

Here are his resolutions:

1) ride 100 miles in a day on the way to losing weight (while eating and drinking whatever he wants – cakes and alcohol most welcome).

2) Prepare for a Masters degree in Maths. So as to carry out research at the Dept of Cosmology and Gravitation. So as to get a Phd. So as to stick two fingers up the doctors, consultant and anaesthetists living in his road (if Brian May can do it, why can’t Matt?)

3) Climb Mount Washington in New Hampshire (despite hips/kidney)

4) Rebuild his Z1000 Kawasaki and upset his neighbours (Matt was never a Hell’s Angel, he tells me, just leather jacketed, anti-social, immature, heavy drinking and belligerent).

5) And, of course, become a magistrate (thus giving him the power to incarcerate leather jacketed, anti-social, immature…

Mind you, these are mere resolutions, Matt. The proof will be in the pudding.

And you have a lot of catching up to do. We already have a fairly large pike in our keep-net. And I don’t want to crow but I wrestled my way through two entire lengths of crawl today before asphyxiating. I appear to have hurt my back in the process, and tweaked a hamstring but, for a sedantary 49-year-old would-be athlete, that's real progress, that is. Mount Washington? Pah... I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, it's a molehill.