It was incredibly lucky that they caught it (my cousin was not so lucky and died from a brain tumour a short while ago) but, unsurprisingly, the act of scooping out a chunk of John’s brain had a major effect upon him. Whole chunks of his memory were gone (except strangely for the lyrics of eighties music for which he has a now encyclopaedic memory), he had problems with his short-term memory and his short-circuited brain chemistry gave him severe depression.

I shared a flat with some close friends of John and he came to live with us in Kentish Town. Things seemed to be going well, though at times I would come down the stairs to hear John crying in his room. Shortly afterwards I went off on an expedition to Greenland, and when I returned John had gone. He had taken himself down to Beachy Head and prepared to jump off and kill himself. Luckily the police found him and John was strong enough to tell them that he needed help.

John was taken away and placed in a mental health institute, sharing his ward with people whose mental difficulties at time dwarfed his own. We would get the occasional phone call from John, and it was on one of these that he told us he would shortly be on day release and able to come and see us.

Sitting in our conservatory, John talked about his depression and in some ways it seemed very much linked to not being able to see a future. Acting did not seem to be a viable option anymore and John could not visualise anything else. What was the point in living if you had nothing to live for? Now, Ben and I talk a lot about the importance of goal-setting in life and attempting to do that which you are not sure you can do. I wondered if this might help John, so sitting there I said “John we have six months, next April you are going to run the London marathon”. John pointed out that I was the crazy one, he had never run before and got out of breath walking down the street. At which point I lent him some running trainers and told him we were heading out in ten minutes.

I beasted John on that run, I took him up the steepest longest hills in the area, at times running behind him and pushing him along. So many times John told me that he couldn’t carry on and I would ignore him, and somehow he found it in him to continue. He didn’t stop that day and by the time we reached home again he had run ten miles: ten more than he had ever run before. It wasn’t a traditional way to begin a training campaign and ran a real risk of turning John off running for life, but I wanted to show him that, even then, he was capable of far more than he thought. Just because he couldn’t see it did not mean he couldn’t do it. By the end of that day, he believed that with the right training there was a marathon in him.

The next time we went running, I strapped a heart rate monitor on John and didn’t let him break 160 beats per minute; he spent a fair amount of time walking but this time enjoyed the run. From then on John began to run more and more, mixing up sprints, long slow sessions and medium pace runs. Each day he would gain in confidence and I enjoyed the amazement in his voice when he would talk about the ease with which he took on hills that had nearly broken him on that first day. He moved out of the ward and found his own place, near enough to the park that he could continue his training.

Yesterday, John stood at the startline of the London marathon, wearing a pink polystyrene brain helmet and his runners number. Under the hottest conditions ever recorded for the London marathon, John made the 26.2 miles in four hours and 49 minutes, never stopping or walking once. I don’t think I’ve ever been so proud of someone as I was of John yesterday.

John raised £5,000 for the Brain Research Trust and is not stopping there. We’ve begun talking about how we might run across the continental US in the near future and I am also trying to persuade him that an Ironman might be a good training session to put in. After all if he can come from nowhere to run a marathon, what is there out there that he can’t achieve if he puts his mind to it.

Thanks John, yesterday you made my day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ben had been caught by a delayed delivery man and was unable to make it over so we skyped him in on my laptop and occasionally he would pipe up with ideas as they came to him or useful nuggets of information that I had overlooked. It was a little surreal, as though HAL from 2001 or KITT from Knightrider were suddenly spouting away on the table. I don’t know if he got the full impact of the meeting, but to me it was like seeing something so innately familiar for the first time, jamais vu maybe. It was also deeply humbling to see the company that designed the first laptop, the first mouse dedicating manhours to SOUTH for no other reason than they believed in our dream.

Walking through the city tonight, my ipod choosing pitch-perfect tracks for me, it felt like seeing London for the first time too. I got to the station but just carried on walking; I felt like a tourist, and I realised that London doesn’t really start until one floor up. If you walk along Regent street you can see dingy woolen goods shops mixing with over-priced suitmakers, but one floor up and it’s an infinitely long palace of french balconies, stone-wrought urns and architectural intricacies that seem to be the last true vestige of empire. Up Portland Place, past the conical All Souls Church standing guard over the BBC and the windows are interspersed with wreaths and ornate overhangs, through Park crescent with its gleaming porticoes that really show you what old money means until Regents Park interjects a vista of darkness among the lights and London has never seemed so much a part of me. On expeditions I often imagine streets in London in the most vivid of detail, today I was reminded why that’s no bad thing.

They call it a musical, a family one apparently. But what kind of sick individual would take his family to see this? My father apparently. As a family treat in honour of my mother’s 20th 40th birthday, he decided this clarion call for moral iniquity would make a fun night out.

This descent into the heart of darkness starts out deceptively enough with the story of a bunch of brothers who seem to have left ballet school to make their way in the wild west and I settled down to watch what I only imagined was going to be some kind of high-camp cowboy romp. Then it all went dark.

Midway through the performance, the brothers are rebuffed at ‘a social’. Instead of using this as a learning experience about the importance of personal hygiene, they decide to re-enact the most famous, vicious gang-rape in history: the rape of the Sabine women. They then promptly kidnap the local women and hold them against their will in a remote mountain cabin, echoing for me the recent harrowing Austrian kidnap case where Natascha Kampusch was kept in a basement for years by Wolfgang Priklopil. Then, in a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome, the women begin to fall in love with their captors and there are weddings galore.

That a musical can come out with the essential moral lesson that if you can’t get a girl to talk to you when she’s out one night, you should kidnap her and wait for her to fall in love with you, is quite simply sick. That my father, who apparently knew the plot before we even got there, would think this appropriate for a family celebration suggests our long history of family insanity has struck again. I fear for the future.

It also means that when they mention casually that they are supporting Erykah Badu at Somerset House, you point out that someone who in part makes his living from moving heavy things would be a useful backstage presence. So thus it was that last Friday and Saturday night were spent lugging amps, speakers, bass guitars and pianos around the stage of the most beautiful venue in all England before listening to my friends play the biggest gig of their life so far and then watch Ms Badu get her groove on.

Mr Hudson and his band lit up the stage and got a fantastic reception from the assembled throng, Ace reporter and photographer Carl Wilkinson took some great shots and has kindly put them up on Flickr for everyone’s delight and delectation. Erykah was late the first night (apparently she was jetlagged and fell asleep) and phoned it in a little, but Saturday night was fantastic as she ripped the night apart. The only possible problem was when I accidentally barged into her pre-gig prayer group on my way to the bathroom. Luckily all eyes were contemplating the lord and few were contemplating me so I made my escape. The only thing that would have made the night more fun would have been not knowing that I was due to leave early the next morning for a 90-mile training ride with Ben.