Patrick sent a mental cheers, mate to the bloke upstairs. Not that the run would have been cancelled for anything short of an actual apocalypse, but good weather made a lot of things much, much easier. And a lot more pleasant. By the start time, eleven o’clock, the runners were not so much lined up as sort of milling around, chatting, but they were nearly all more or less in the right place. It’d do. Patrick took a moment to be frankly amazed how many people had turned up for what had started out as an idea over a pint and had turned into the biggest fundraising event he’d ever organised. Half the runners here were from Bishops Langley. Most of the people in that place liked to act as if they hadn’t even heard of Shamwell, let alone ever wanted to go there. Patrick nodded to his mum, who was waiting to start the race. She’d insisted on turning up in top-to-toe Lycra, even though she wasn’t actually running, but she looked pretty good in it, her figure just on the voluptuous side of slender that a lot of blokes seemed to go for.
