Went karting on Saturday. Dave had booked an outdoor session at Raceland for sixteen of us, and despite a couple of last minute drop outs and replacements, it all went terribly smoothly and we lined up on the grid about 4 pm.

The outdoor karts are twin engined beasts, harnessing the awesome power of two lawnmower engines. They can apparently do 70 mph, and after a few practice laps, I was getting the hang of it; most of the lap is flat out, with a few hairpins to weed out the men/maniacs from the boys/those with a sense of self-preservation.

In the first heat, I was starting from the front of the grid alongside Dave. The kart had crawled out of the pit lane and I was franctically waving at the marshal using the internationally accepted gesture for “Help! I think the centrifugal clutch is shagged and my kart is behaving like an asthmatic 2CV.”

Helpfully he ignored me, and the race started. I lumbered forward as the rest of the field thundered past, waving my hands in exaggerated “Oh, I give up” irritation, to yet more studied ignorance of my plight.

Getting out of the kart at the end of the slo-mo ‘race’, I asked a marshal to look at it. “Ah,” he said. “You were driving on one engine.”

Ah indeed. After a quick word with the race manager it turned out I’d actually managed to come 12th and not last, with a fastest lap of 1.17. “One seventeen? On one engine? No way!” he said, and I was slightly mollified.

The next two heats had me starting half way down the grid and then right at the back, and I finished 3rd in both. I had an excellent scrap with Andy B in both of them; we swapped places for a good few laps each time, pushing each other to make mistakes and driving three abreast with back markers at points.

The final was great fun as well: I started 6th and finished 4th, seven tenths of a second off third. So close!

Now I have only the fond memories of it all, and symmetrical bruises on my left and right hip where they constantly banged off the plastic bucket seat. Good times!