For me Murray's epic five hour struggle stretched over more than seventeen hours.

Before he made it to the semis I'd fixed a lunch in Glasgow and since I hadn't seen Bob for a couple of years and he was leaving the city at the weekend I watched what I could, which turned out to be the first two sets, and then set off for Glasgow taking the pricey train instead of my usual free bus to be able to make my appointment.  I had hit the record button at the start so was confident of seeing the rest on my return.

We lunched at the recently opened Martha's.  It's a fast food joint done out in a cheery bold coloured Cbeebies style distinguishing itself from the likes of MacDonalds by the healthy nature of its food.  A strange choice for me you might think and when I tell you that it's also unlicenced your astonishment will know no bounds. But I have not become a health freak and signed the pledge.  The head chef/manager is the son of a school friend.

To undo the damage that abstinence is well known for we repaired to the Drum and Monkey and shared a bottle of exceptionally pleasant New Zealand pinot noir and later to Princes Square to rendezvous with Mrs Bob who was taking a medicinal coffee between shopping bouts.

I got back to Straid Banrìghinn around 5.30 (via a sheet music shop now gone out of business) expecting to catch the 6 o'clock only to learn that 6.30 is the earliest off-peak service back to the east.  When did that happen?  Since that train wouldn't get me to the Usher hall for 7.30 I purchased an upgrade raising the rail over bus premium to even more dizzying multiples of infinity.  My cursing the cost of inter-city travel was somewhat assuaged on learning from Caroline, currently travelling daily between our two great metropolises and who I met on the train, that an on-peak day return sets you back 20 quid if you are not the privileged owner of a senior railcard.

So a brisk walk from Waverley (translate that into Gaelic if you will) saw me settled into seat AA30 in excellent time to enjoy a ravishing programme of Debussy, Prokofiev and Roussel under the always cheerful and chatty Stéphane Denève.  He'll be sorely missed when he hands in his RSNO baton in May.

On my way home I shared the top deck of a 22 with a bunch of cheerful and chatty chaps and chappesses whose banter was as witty as you might expect from the watering it had clearly received.  By 10.15 I had rustled up a can of beans on toast and was comfortably esconced ready to resume the match thanking my lucky stars that I had managed to avoid inadvertently learning the result.

I fast forwarded through the first two and a half hours and was gripped by the terrific third set.  As Murray's last victorious whack of the tie-break died away everything stopped and BT Vision declared that my recording was done.  I don't really blame BT.  Their gadget is not quite clever enough to cope with the Beeb switching from BBC2 to BBC1 to allow a regular noon time programme to run.  But I do blame the BBC.  Would it not have been more sensible to let the match run its course on BBC2 and show the noon time programme on BBC1 thus annoying only one group of viewers rather than two, not to mention recorders.  I insert here another gripe of mine.  They never hesitate to consign Saturday afternoon's Jazz Record Requests to outer darkness in favour of transmissions from the Metropolitan Opera instead of giving it a decent regular slot and padding out the schedule with one-off programmes when the Met doesn't need a 5 o'clock start.

Back to Melbourne.  I then struggled for 20 minutes or so trying to get the iplayer to run the match on my telly.  Getting it up and running was in fact very easy.  The problem was getting it to the start of the fourth set.  It spluttered and wheezed and stopped and started and flahed up mysterious whirling helices till I was driven demented.

I switched off the telly and powered up the laptop and within a short time saw Murray lose the first few games of the fourth set and thus for all his brilliant recovery in the fifth lose the match.

By a quarter to two his struggle and mine were over.