That byline picture at the side of the column; that’s not really me, you understand. That’s Zara Phillips, Lucinda Green and Mary King all rolled into one; the great riders I was pretending to be on Sunday at Strathallan Castle Horse Trials in Perthshire. Amateur sportsmen and women everywhere will understand if I say that Sunday was my Étape du Tour; my London Marathon; my Monte Carlo rally. The day, in other words, when I pretended I could do it like the stars.

Eventing is a scary sport, even at the lowest level. Like all the other small fry, I had only to face the piddliest little jumps, and the simplest dressage test, but nevertheless spent the day in a haze of nerves and semi-paralysis. Happily, I completed without falling off, vomiting with anxiety in public or humiliating my horse, but I can barely remember a thing.

And that’s where the photos come in. Because it was all such a blur, until I see a picture of me going over a jump I won’t actually believe I did it.

Of all the service industries that have sprung up there is nothing to beat vanity sports photography. Millions of amateur sportsmen and women who run, ride, climb, cycle, rally, row, golf and orienteer at weekends now get double the enjoyment: first in the doing, then, when they look up the pictures online on Monday morning, in seeing how they looked. Of the two, the second is often the bigger turn-on.

Every mass participation event these days has a commercial photographer to capture the fleeting glory of the competitors, picking them off one by one as they pass, and posting the images on the internet for purchase. No charity endurance challenge suffices without a record of the exhausted participants crossing the line. No bike race is a proper one without the chance to buy the pictures which, viewed through half-shut eyes, and in a dim light, and after a couple of glasses of wine, make you look exactly like Lance Armstrong powering up to L’Alpe d’Huez.

As a way of wasting money, it’s all very harmless and rather sweet, a means by which we anonymous saddos buy our fantasy of professionalism. And it’s not just photographs of the race winners, of course: the winners are often blasé; they’ve done it before, they don’t need a picture to validate them. The big money in vanity photography is the army of also-rans, the no-hopers, the people whose pictures will never be in the papers.

That’s the real reason why amateurs crave photographs to put on the kitchen wall; not to show off, but because it’s the only way they will actually believe that once, for real, they were not just a spectator. They aspired; they achieved. They looked the part (well almost, in a dim light etc, etc). And best of all, they lived the dream.

Tubby Taleban?

Glasgow, one evening last week, where an outbreak of street violence delayed people trying to get home through the city centre. So there I was, sitting in my car thinking idly, here’s the quintessential difference between Glasgow and Edinburgh: if this was Edinburgh it would be a stunt for a Fringe show, and Charlie and Lucinda would be handing out flyers in a minute — when a couple of young, chip-loving police officers come running down the street towards the trouble.

I say running. They were shambling, barely jogging, heaving and blowing like fat boys who never got picked for games, glancing self-consciously at their captive audience. Plainly they too were familiar with the accepted TV version of crime fighters, sprinting like honed athletes to arrest the baddies, and knew they weren’t exactly living up to it.

Maybe it’s true that obesity is the new friend of crime and terrorism. A leaked memo from Major Brian Dupree, of the Physical Training Corps, discloses that the fight against the Taleban is being hampered because soldiers are increasingly fat and are ignoring the minimum requirement of two to three hours of physical fitness a week. Perhaps we simply need to start feeding our enemies more.

Behind you

Actually I put it all down to the fashion that says it’s uncool to run anywhere. Anyone seeking a smidgin of street cred, or wanting to impress a teenager, should familiarise themselves with the latest YouTube phenomenon, which is a song called Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions. Essentially, this is a skit on the Hollywood cliché of the hero walking towards camera in slow motion while the universe blows up behind him.

The delightful thing is, it’s a parody of teenage culture as much as it is of Hollywood; and the comedians Andy Samberg, Will Ferrell and J. J. Abrams are now fast catching up with Susan Boyle’s clip from Britain’s Got Talent. “While ordinary people stand slack-jawed and staring, real men have the nuts to walk away ... the more you ignore it, the cooler you look.”

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