My friend Auriol‘s dad [yellow shirt, right-hand side of photo] wasn’t one of the six men who ran in the mile race in which Roger Bannister broke the four-minute “barrier”, but he should have been. He is still an unbelievably active and adventurous man who yomps around mountainous, remote parts of the World for fun and is even having difficulty retiring from medicine. Now the BBC has tracked him down for a 50th-anniversary documentary about that famous race and every time I turn on Radio 4 since Sunday I seem to hear his voice in the trailer for the show. It’s spooky. (When I first met Auriol I was living opposite the Iffley Road race track.)