I have an embarrassing confession.

As you may know, I ran the Brighton Marathon. It was hellish hot and at 22 miles the thought occured to me that I would be far better off just stopping. I was tired. Then a small group of runners passed me and on a whim I decided that I’d hitch onto their coat tails to see if they couldn’t drag me to the finish.

After a mile all but one of that group had fallen away leaving me running the final three miles with someone called Clare. I know she was called Clare because she had her name on her running top which meant the crowd kept shouting, “Go, Clare!”

Well, I don’t know how you feel when you’ve run 23 miles in the increasing heat but I can tell you that the final three miles to 26.2 are very, very hard especially when you have picked up your pace by a mile a minute. Each 400m seemed a mile long.

As Clare faded at one point I urged her to keep going. As I virtually passed out she told me only a mile to go.

And so we finally crossed the finish line. I had intended to turn round to her and thank her for helping me finish in the kind of time I’d hoped to finish in but the end of the marathon is chaos and by the time I’d turned round, Clare was nowhere to be seen.

This morning, I looked up the Brighton Marathon results and just below my name as a finisher was Clare [surname deleted]. On another whim, I decided to see if she was on Facebook so that I could let her know that she helped me cross the finish line in a respectable time. Blow me, but she was. So I sent her a message of thanks.

This is when I panicked. I suddenly thought, what if she goes on my Facebook page? I went onto it and, in contrast to Clare’s 300+ friends I had two, one of whom apparently is Nathalie Brolin whom some of you may remember. Christ, she’ll think I’m a pervert stalking her, I thought. Some Johnny No Mates who runs marathons as an excuse to be an on-line pest. Bugger. What do I do?

What did I do? What I did was quickly go around loads of people’s Facebook pages and click on their names so that my Facebook page would fill up. So if any of you find a request from me to be your friend, now you know why.

It is not because I like you.