The ultimate test Watching this glorious sporting summer has given me a headache

There is a crick in my neck, a rick in my back, and a permanent ache behind my eyes.

- Emma John

A friend refuses to offer sympathy. "You did this to yourself," she says as I pop paracetamol. Thousands of hours of medical research are ploughed into elite sport, but where are the studies into the physical and mental demands of keeping up with it? While winter may be fiercely programmed, it's the multi-disciplinary bunfight of summer that is the ultimate test of a sports fan. Right when our diaries demand we're at our most sociable, our most available, our most outdoors, the calendar loses all sense of perspective and dumps events on us like it's trying to save them from a burning building.

The past fortnight has offered a pair of excellent, if contrasting, case studies. The first was the weekend of the Euros final; also the Lions' crucial second Test against Australia and England's critical fourth Test against India; also, my Norfolk friends' silver wedding anniversary. They couldn't have known, when they married 25 years ago, that their celebrations would clash with multiple major sporting events, but they wouldn't have cared either: Nigel and Claire loathe sports, and don't own a TV.