I was galloping like a man possessed; eye balls out like Linford Christie after an industrial sized hit of crystal meth; slicing through the Great British countryside like a freshly sharpened pair of garden shears; pounding out each life-affirming stride after another like some leopard-human hybrid; bisecting bucolic Old Blighty like a surgeon with a scalpel the size of a fucking rhinoceros, felling the living twat out of anything and everything that dare of the gumption to hinder my path to total and absolute physical and mental greatness.
So I was running quite fast.
No, actually, I wasn't. I was doing that thing where you think you're running fast but then a family of four generations out for a post-prandial constitutional, stroll passed at a canter and ask if you require the assistance of a paramedic, or a vet, or a fucking priest.
Fortunately, during this instance, I was going far too slowly to place any significant strain on any of my vital organs, and I continued on my ungainly path to my house and my kitchen and my fridge and my beer. Oh beer, how I adore the aeration of thee.
Down a particularly cumbersome stretch of singletrack, I noted that, to either side of me were fields densely packed, bristling some may say, with stinging nettles. They actually looked like stinging nettle plantations.
"Crumbs!" I thought, "It'd be really painful to trip over and fall head first into that stinging nettle plantation."
About three seconds later, I tripped over and fell head first into that stinging nettle plantation.
And after a few moments of flaying around on my fucking back like a huge deranged wailing insect, I got up and surveyed the damage. Not one square inch of body had escaped the wrath of this vicious twat of a plant, and off I went in search of dock leaves, my skin now starting to bubble after the histamine hit.
Three days later and the stinging sensation has just about abated.
You can keep your vipers and your tigers and your fucking asiatic black bears.
Blighty is a minefield in its own right. We have stinging nettles. That is our claim to fame. And it's a good one.