Well that's how my wife describes the process of getting a Masters degree via distance learning. In this respect, I think she is referring to her own Masters in Applied Linguistics - obtained through the Open University - as well as my own attempt. She said it again yesterday, and it's got me thinking: me having just read an article about disabled athletes in today's Independent on Sunday.

Marathons are something I know a bit about, you see, having run a few in my time. The last one I did was in Paris three or four years ago. That was an experience! I went on my own. Carole was going to come with me, but was unable to at the last minute.

After the race, I went back to the hotel and, realising I didn't have more than twelve Euros left in my pocket, decided to go out and change a cheque ... but then thought better of it. "Heck!" I thought, "I've got my credit card. Much better to lie down for a few minutes".

It was eight o'clock in the evening when I awoke, and I was starving. So off I went, resplendent in my Paris Marathon T-shirt, in search of a restaurant. Not far from the hotel, I came across a little Bangladeshi place that looked just the thing. I entered, and was greeted by the proprietor who waved me to a table. When he brought the menu, I thought I'd better just check:

"M'sieur, vous acceptez les cartes banquaires?"

"Ah m'sieur! Le machine ne marche pas."

In dismay, I explained that I had only twelve Euros on me, and that I must therefore find another place to eat. At this point the proprietor noticed my T-shirt.

"Mais, vous avez couru le marathon?"

"Oui, c'etait aujourd'hui."

In a voice loud enough for all his customers to hear, he proclaimed that if a man had run a marathon and deigned to patronise his eating house, he deserved a meal for twelve Euros. Thrusting the menu back into my startled hands he declared that I should choose what I pleased. Everything on the menu, for me, totalled twelve Euros.

Neither was there any avoiding a carafe of the house red. It would have been churlish to explain that I am, more or less, teetotal.

Yes, running a marathon is quite an achievement. Yet I remember running the Robin Hood marathon in Nottingham in 1994 - the one I ran for my father, to raise money for a cancer charity.

There was a stretch of road on the course that was used for the athletes going out - on one side - and those coming in - on the other. As we ran up the one side, having run some seven or eight miles, the wheelchair athletes - whose race had begun some time before ours - were coming down the other. Every single able-bodied athlete on the road applauded, spontaneously, the wheelchair athletes as they passed. We knew how much training for a marathon had cost us. We also knew that we could not imagine, could not begin to imagine how much it had cost those who had done it without the use of their legs.

Given the job I'm in, as a computer programmer, it's not surprising that I spend a lot of time on the Internet: and quite a lot of that time, on the Web. So I found myself earlier today, having just read again my last entry, idly remembering my childhood and the things we used to do.

For the first seventeen years of my life, the most important thing in it was cricket. All I ever wanted to do was to play for Yorkshire. Not England. Playing for England would have been nice: but playing for Yorkshire would have been the pinnacle. Of course I was never good enough, but in childhood and adolescence you're allowed to dream: and dream I did.

In my reverie I remembered an annual event that sadly is no more - and has not been for quite some time - the Parkhead Cricket Festival. Naturally, I looked it up on the Web. There is a site for the club:

http://www.parkhead.cricketclub.btinternet.co.uk

but not for the festival. So this little article is to put that right.

I don't remember now when or why the Parkhead Cricket Festival ceased to be. I do remember, though, that throughout my childhood and into my teens it was one of the occasions that marked the turning of the year - along with Palm Sunday, the Whit Sing in Endcliffe Park, Works Weeks and the Sheffield Show.

It was sandwiched in somewhere between the Scarborough Cricket Festival and the proper start of the football season and consisted of a number of day and evening games between a variety of guest teams.

The Parkhead cricket ground is in many ways a traditional English village ground. Bordered on the South and West by Abbey Lane and Ecclesall Road South, it has the Wheatsheaf pub and the wooden pavilion at its north end and part of Ecclesall Woods to the east. It is small - compact I guess you'd say - with boundaries that cannot be more than 50 yards, if that.

Every year we would catch the tram to Ecclesall terminus, or walk the couple of miles up the hill, to make the annual pilgrimage. As a boy, of course, entry was by crawling under the canvasses erected along Ecclesall Road South to thwart unpaying eyes. As manhood beckoned, we'd pay our way, to prove to the girls that we could.

So what makes this undistinguished event in the southern suburbs of Sheffield so worthy of remembrance? This. Every year, this unnassuming little club arranged cricket matches between the two Sheffield football clubs - United and Wednesday - and between themselves and a number of teams: but more than that, they arranged for Yorkshire to play there. And more, even, than that, the visiting tourists would also play - against that Yorkshire team. At Parkhead I saw Freddie Trueman bowl, and saw him bat - hitting sixes towards the inviting windows of the Wheatsheaf Tavern. I saw Bob Appleyard before his early retirement and early death, Johnny Wardle - whose wicket I would one day take - and Jimmy Binks who would have played regularly for England but for Godfrey Evans. I saw Doug Padgett, Roger Taylor and Brian Close - who used to get us complimentary tickets for the games at Bramall Lane.

But there, on this tiny ground I saw the three 'W's of Worrall, Weekes and Walcott. I saw the young Garfield Sobers and all those great West Indians.

Sometimes I think I must have dreamt all this. Did all these people really visit us? Did they stay so close to my home? Did I really sit with them on the steps of a tiny, white-painted, wooden pavilion at a club cricket ground on the edge of Sheffield?

I think I did. And I think it says something about the age we grew up in, that people who today would be celebrities beyond our reach were then celebrities in our midst. I don't know what happened to extract celebrities from their society - what drove us to drive them out. Perhaps we pursued them too closely and made them lock themselves away. Perhaps it's simply a matter of money. More likely it's a mixture of many things.

I do know that it was better then, when you could touch the hem of your hero's gown - or just sit quietly at his side. Or listen to him swearing - as was the case with Freddie Trueman. He may be responsible for the addition of more than one word to my vocabulary.

And it's sad that it cannot now be done. The Parkhead Cricket Festival is no more - has not been for many a long year. We are poorer for that whether we follow cricket or not.

But the real value of Parkhead Cricket Festival in those days of its prime, was not to consort with heroes: at least, that was not its main importance to little boys who loved cricket. I've mentioned that Ecclesall Woods made up one side of the pitch, and into that wood flew a great many cricket balls over the course of the week.

Cricket balls were like gold to working class boys of Sheffield. In the parks where we learnt our game we usually made do with cork balls bought from the local Post Office for a few coppers. I even remember playing with a hockey ball, once. To have a real leather ball was a dream come true.

Parkhead Cricket Festival was a cricket ball mine. Tens of young boys would scour those woods for lost balls. The more financially oriented would return them to the club for the shilling reward they offered; but the true cricket lover would stuff his pockets with as many as he could find, for these were next year's kit, and priceless.

I've spent this week up in Sheffield, visiting my mother, Jane - my sister, and my eldest daughter - Maxine. It was a grand visit. On Thursday night we all went out, with my sister's boyfriend - if you can have boyfriends at 55 years of age - her daughter, Liz, and Liz's partner, Adam. That made us eight for a meal at B.B's Italian restaurant.

My daughter has just completed her post-graduate teaching qualification and will be teaching in Hackney, London, next year. Liz is now Dr Elizabeth Austen, having recently finished her PhD in Criminal Psychology.

Carole and I stayed at my sister's for the time we were up there. Jane keeps her house rather warmer than I like it during the night; and so I found myself lying awake and wondering how my father would have reacted to this plethora of post-graduate awards. Not very visibly is my guess. He was not one to show, or express his feelings.

I've mentioned before that his birth, in 1919, over 10 years after the birth of his sisters, Ruby and Olive, was something of a surprise to his parents. So he was what we call in Wales, "Y cyw melyn olaf" - the last yellow chick.

The scholarship exam placed him, at twelve years of age, into the Sheffield Technical School, from which he matriculated, but without the kind of distinction that would have offered him a university place. Not that his parents could have afforded for him to go into higher education anyway. Instead, he joined the Post Office as an apprentice telephone engineer. His closest friends were then and remained the three young men who started their apprenticeships with him - Phillip, Harry and John - until they were cruelly taken by heart attacks, one after the other, in their mid fifties. This shocked my father so much that he arranged to have a medical check up at the Sheffield Hallamshire Hospital, where they gave him a clean bill of health, but added that that did not mean that he would not drop dead of a heart attack as he walked back down the hospital drive.

Although his work was at the Post Office, his heart was in sport and in particular in playing football. At sixteen years of age he tried for papers with Sheffield United, but they told him he was too short - at five foot six and a quarter inches, ever to be a professional. Sheffield Wednesday, however, took a more encouraging line and referred him to Lopham, one of their "incubator" clubs, from where he was transferred to Norton Woodseats as they sought a replacement right half in their quest for Amateur Cup glory.

In 1938, he had trials with West Brom and Arsenal, and was offered papers by West Brom. Unsure of what he should do, he turned to my Uncle Colin, Olive's husband, for advice. His advice was to stick with the Post Office: advice that may have saved his life since he would have been amongst the first called up in the war had he signed for West Brom.

I remember Colin, sixteen years my father's senior, as a bitter, broken man; his body ravaged by emphacemia caused by his trade as a silversmith at Mappin and Webbs. In his latter years he would walk slowly up the hill of Ecclesall Road stopping to look in all the shop windows: too proud to show he was out of breath and could walk no further. He was called up to fight in 1940 and joined the Desert Rats. When he came back, his son, Paul, whom he had never seen, was six years old and cried at the presence of this stranger thrust upon him. Colin and Paul were never close, and Paul remained, in my eyes at least, something of a "Mother's boy", with no interest in sports. Later I learnt from my mother that Colin had been a fine sportsman, maybe better than my father. How cruel the hand Fate dealt him.

My father was called up in 1942 and crossed into France on D-Day plus one. Only very rarely would he mention the war, but from the occasional glimpse he gave me it seems that his job, as a member of the Royal Signals, was to set up field exchanges for the invading troops by driving in front of the front line and commandeering suitable buildings.

I remember, when I was eighteen years old, sitting in the Prince of Wales pub with my father holding an animated conversation about the rights and wrongs of pacifism, with me arguing the pacifist cause. At the end of the night, my father went to the toilet and whilst he was there I was approached by a man of about my father's age in regimental blazer and tie, who lambasted me verbally for my perceived pacifistm. "If it wasn't for those of us who fought in the war, you would not be here to make these stupid arguments... " and so on. He was still at it when my father returned. He sat down and listened in silence until the haranguer turned to him for support:

"You were not the only one who fought in the war," said my father, "And some of us didn't enjoy it."

Whatever his experiences in the army, he returned to civilian life a committed Socialist. In particular, he became an active trade unionist. Some time in the 1960s he was elected Branch Treasurer and later became Secretary of a branch that by then numbered over two thousand members. In effect, he became a full-time trade union official.

My father was a negotiator, not a militant in the traditional sense despite a committment to some of the more esoteric parties of the left. For over twenty years he served his members in this way - and a wider constituency as an active member of the Trades and Labour Council - until the advent of the black-and-white politics of the Thatcher years forced him to yield to a branch committee that he could no longer support. The years that followed were of black depression and growing ill-health.

With great determination he beat the depression that haunted him, although it prevented him from accepting his union's gold badge - their highest award - because he would have cried in accepting it: and he would not ever allow that. He beat also his addiction to the tablets prescribed for the depression. But in 1994, he succumbed to throat cancer. In a few short months, he slipped from being an active seventy-something year old, to being a shuffling, suffering wreck.

But he had one last gift for me.

In April 1994, as my father lay ill, Carole and I decided to marry. We had been partners for over three years and it seemed right, somehow. On our next trip up to Sheffield to visit my father in hospital, we talked and, on leaving, told him what we planned. Carole showed him her engagement ring and they kissed. As we turned to go, at the moment we opened the door to leave, my father coughed and raised his voice as best he could:

"Look after him Carole," he said, "He's daft."

We crossed the car park and got into the car - my father's old car. "Well," I said, "If those are the last words I hear from my father, I'll settle for that."

Three days later I was called back to Sheffield. My father's life was draining away. For three days we kept vigil by his bedside as he, full up with morphine, stared sightlessly at the ceiling. I told him all the things I'd wanted him to hear, but never said. I remember apologising for not being a better footballer. And in my mind I heard, over and over, the words that Dylan Thomas wrote to his own father at his death:

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

But he did not. He was never a fighter. A negotiator second to none. But not a fighter, and you cannot negotiate with death.

And on the third day, he died.

I miss him still, although this all happened twelve years ago. What would he have thought about this MSc? What would he have said? Would he have been proud?

I like to think so. Maybe he'd allow that in this, as in my choice of second wife, I've done something not quite so daft.