The London marathon – I can’t tell you how glad I’ll be when that’s over for another year. Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with the actual race but because of those e-mails. You know the ones.

Dear bestest friends (we barely nod at each other in the corridor and now we’re pals?), apologies for the global (you’re not really sorry, are you? You’re just lazy). Just wanted you to know that I’m running the London marathon next month. I know! I wouldn’t have thought it possible either! (It’s not that amazing. Not if more than 32,000 people manage to do it, some of whom are 97 and some of whom are wearing dumbbells. And you’re probably going to walk most of it anyway. So stop with all the exclamation marks.)

I’ve been training hard for six months and I’m determined to make it to the finish line (obviously), not just for my own sense of achievement (here it comes), but for all those poor sick children battling (insert horrible disease here).

Cheers, guys, for all your support (I haven’t said I would yet), from Hugo (you would be called Hugo, wouldn’t you?).

Not only do these e-mails, and there are always at least 327 of them per marathon, make me feel a bit tight and a bit like I don’t care about sick children.

I know what’s going to happen this weekend. I’ll be sitting in front of the telly eating a large Cornish pasty of self-loathing because I didn’t sponsor Hugo. Or Val. Or Scoops.

I’ll be lying there, examining my depressing pot belly and watching all you stinking, waving, gurning, smug do-gooders jog your way into a sense of achievement, of purpose, of shallow, sweaty, foil-wrapped group happiness. Except the few of you who will dehydrate.

At least I managed to escape Sport Relief. Nobody, it seems, had the courage to send me an e-mail asking for sponsorship for running a mile. It is, after all, a mile. I do that every day, just to catch the train. In business shoes. With an umbrella and a hangover. Yes, I know I should have left earlier. Who are you – my wife?

I suppose it’s not as bad as the “please can you sponsor me to go on a nice holiday” chancers. This really is the most astonishing cheek. They pay a nominal registration fee to some charity tour operator and then start making the rest of us feel bad for another £2,000 or so. Out of that, the charity coughs up for the holiday.

Anything left over goes towards helping those children in Thingybaijan or saving the last three fluffy but impotent creatures of Simboloto or financing the charity executive’s top-of-the-range Volvo.

It’s just about bearable when the holiday involves a bit of school-building or well-digging or teaching of scruffy street kids. But the last three I’ve been arm-twisted into have been holiday holidays: a “charity” trek that is really just a trek; a “charity” hike up Kilimanjaro (Kilimanjaro is doing fine without you); a fortnight in a stilted ocean villa in the Seychelles. With massages thrown in. And fruit.

It’s not that I’m anticharidee. In the past I have even done a lot of work for it. Well, a bit. Once. But sponsorship’s different. It should require doing something either hard or novel or both.

I will sponsor someone only if they plan to become the first person called Geoff to pogo to the pole or squeeze 300 different vegetable-based crudités into a matchbox or eat five whole baby pandas in half an hour. I will not sponsor someone if most of the sponsorship goes towards them having fun. I will not sponsor them if we’re only on nodding-in-the-lift terms either.

So in the meantime may you all get blisters and need to relieve yourselves in the gutter like Radcliffe, you marathon blackmailers.

Oh, and by the way, guess what? I’m running to work tomorrow, saving money to find a cure for man flu. If you want to help, please send cash, not cheques, to the usual address. If you don’t, it’s okay. Don’t feel guilty. No, really. All those poor sick men with their Lemsips – they’ll be fine.

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