You can't swing a cat in Yorkshire these days without hitting an Olympic Gold Medallist

This weekend I took my mum to the Dales for her birthday.  On the way home we popped into a tea shop in Burnsall and on the next table was Alistair Brownlee, the Olympic Triathlon Champion.

On these occasions I don't have the good fortune to have bloody Richard Curtis writing my lines for me, like he does for bloody Hugh Grant in Notting Hill when meeting Julia Roberts, so I just have to make up my own stuff.  I started out pretty well by congratulating him, and shaking his hand, and probably should have left it at that, but the longer I sat there, the more I thought how cool it would be to get a photo with him, and as I was between him and Ruth I thought she could probably get a picture of me on the sly, and he'd be in the background, and so I wouldn't have to bother him, but of course, she has bloody principles, which happen to include not photographing Gold Medallists without their permission, so she asked him for permission, and it all turned out okay, and we ended up with a better photo, but I also ended up losing any pretence of cool.

I'd only noticed him in the first place because the cafe owner was loudly making a fuss of him, and trying to get him to cycle round the Dales with his Gold Medal in a bum bag so he could bring it in and show her, and his brother Jonathan the Bronze Medallist was also there, but he had his back to me, and I didn't notice him, and it isn't that a Bronze Medallist isn't worth the fuss, because he most certainly is, and he won the Bronze Medal after getting a 15 second penalty for getting on his bike a nanosecond early, so he deserves as much credit as Alistair, and afterwards I felt bad that I hadn't congratulated him too, but I genuinely couldn't recognise him from only the back of his head, and there was another guy there who was tall and blond and thin, and he might have been in the Olympics too, but I didn't recognise him at all.

And after I'd got my photo with Alistair, a whole bloody family of people started trying to muscle in and get a piece of him, and the cafe owner was nagging him even more about bringing his medal in, and as we drove off, my mum and Ruth and I had a long and at times heated conversation about how to handle meeting Olympic Gold Medallists in tea shops, and this is sort of what I think after having that conversation.

For two weeks I watched the Olympics, and I found a lot of it genuinely inspiring, but the most direct connection I had with it was either shouting at the telly, or knowing that an Olympic Gold Medal winning rower's parents had killed my domestic animals (they are vets, so it was all above board, and I'm not looking to turn them in).

And now here I was, eating a scone, and there on the next table, also eating a scone was an Olympic Gold Medallist, and in these days of bloody Twitter and Facebook and bloody internet forums and discussion groups about every bloody subject under the sun, I wanted to acknowledge directly to that person, that they had done something remarkable, and that I had seen it.  Because to wander off into the car park of eternity without at least saying congratulations, would be a missed opportunity.

Wanting to get my picture taken afterwards was totally gratuitous, and for my own benefit, so I can tell everyone I know that this event took place, but hey ho, nobody's perfect.

And it may well be a total pain in the arse to be knocking around your own neighbourhood trying to do whatever you did before the Olympics, and having people constantly interrupting your scone eating or soap powder buying to shake your hand and get a picture of you, and a lot of those people might be tactless idiots who don't have any regard for your privacy or personal space, but in the middle of all that  are people like me.  Me, who was genuinely inspired by what I saw, and who didn't want to miss the chance to have a bigger connection to London 2012 than you can get from shouting at the telly. or from sending bloody tweets, whatever the hell they are.

So, if I see Kat Copeland next week buying some tofu in my local Tesco, or if I see Mo Farah in a train station one day, or Jessica Ennis in a launderette, or if I should encounter Chris Hoy buying power tools in a Scottish branch of B&Q, I will most likely take the opportunity to say to each of them 'Well done in the Olympics, you were incredible, and while I was sat on the sofa eating Wispa bars, you were totally inspiring, and I'm sorry if I'm intruding into your personal space, but I just wanted to wish you well, and while I'm here, can I have a photo please?'

Unless that is, I bump into Richard Curtis in the meantime, and perhaps he could write me a script for such occasions.  Because not only did I not win the Olympic Gold Medal for cycling, running, shooting or canoeing, I didn't win it for knowing how to talk to Olympians in the street either.