The show had to go on

I finished my last lesson of the day at 5pm yesterday and donned my old Glasgow Rangers top and paint-splattered shorts to stagger round the banks of lake Teganuma. I covered just over 10km in one hour and seven minutes, for all you running folk out there (who will know that is quite a slow time) but I needed to get some training in before the half marathon around the whole lake in eight weeks. As I crossed over the main bridge, along the path where I snapped the Abiko Imperial Navy, I could see menacing black storm clouds ahead of me with occasional forked lightning. Time to turn back and sign up at a gym with cable TV? Heck no! I thought I would just increase my pace and make it round the lake before I was too much of a sitting duck for the rain and lightning. Well, I didn't make it. Ten minutes later the heavens opened up and I was drenched in one of those downpours that reminds you you're not in England anymore. And then, in the midst of the tempest, I found myself squelching through a small park, but I could hear music. I looked up and saw a stage with 20 hula dancers in grass skirts shimmying along to a Hawaiian ditty. The audience (if there had been one) had long gone, but the show had to go on. As I did, thoroughly drenched, back home.