You can hear it here, Mr Brown, if you so wish. It is the voice, one presumes, of one of the 300 or so runners who have been using Little Stoke park every Saturday morning in order to degrade the pathways.

Or, if you want to look at it from their point of view, to enjoy regular exercise in congenial company. And whose enjoyment may well be at an end if the Council doesn’t change its mind over imposing a charge that parkrun’s chief operating officer Tom Williams says would “contradict our principles” and “set a precedent that threatens our future.”

For the record, the short audio clip contains the following emotional assessment from a featured female regular:  “It’s devastating .. the friendships, the support … it’s the people … it’s not the running, it’s the people. It’s the people…”

This halting encomium strikes the key notes of what parkrun has attempted to do - in the UK and around the world - since its founder, Paul Sinton-Hewitt, developed the idea through organising a run at Bushy Park in London 12 years ago.

Like all great ideas, parkrun is simple: every Saturday morning, all over the world, people run for 5km around a park. It’s free. Then they go for coffee, which may not be.

A couple of years ago I interviewed Williams, who summarised the whole notion with suitable clarity.

“The social element is fundamental to parkrun,” he said. “Our events start at 9am, not too early for people to get out of bed, but not too late to prevent them doing other things with their day. It gets the weekend off to a good start.

“The fact that it is free is also fundamental. The difference between 50p and £2 as a charge is not a lot, but the difference between paying nothing and 50p is huge. 

““There is the opportunity to get together in a relaxed atmosphere, to meet friends, to have a smile and a chat while doing something that improves your fitness and your health. I always think parkrun is a bit like going to church – a lot of people with a common vision who come together on a regular basis.”

Now the churchgoing, it seems, is being threatened by Mammon. Or maybe Duty.

A cynical person might almost suppose Mr Brown and his Parish Council had been put up to their ban in order to stimulate a huge wave of reaction in support of the running model that already has 2.35m registered participants globally across 12 countries including Australia, South Africa, Poland, the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, the United States, Singapore, Russia and France.

There was even a regular parkrun for service personnel at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. (No one tried charging for that, I believe).

Among those who have spoken up in protest at the Council’s decision are marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe, double Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes, former French Open winner and television presenter Sue Barker, Sports Minister Tracey Crouch and the Mayor of Bristol, in whose northern suburb the proud parish of Little Stoke sits.

Double Olympic rowing champion James Cracknell tweeted: “London Road Safety Council quarterly meeting Q: should I apologise for destroying W London pavements with my graceful running style earlier?”

Meanwhile a petition has been set up in support of parkrun continuing to provide their weekly exercise for free, which,  nine hours before this blog was written numbered 19,500 signatures, and had risen to 28,000 within four more hours…

Mr Brown conceded it was not possible to evaluate the cost of the runners’ impact on the park, but said: “Three-hundred feet pounding the paths every Saturday morning does cause extra wear.”

He added that a football team which used the park had asked if it could have reduced fees and claimed that parkrun could apply for a grant to keep the event free.

Mmm... still looks like a clear and classically small-minded example of municipal misjudgment.

In a week where the meldonium question has gone into meltdown, this sporting issue is at least refreshingly simple to most observers.

(Oh, that meldonium, it’s causing pandemonium. The World Anti-Doping Agency are now unsure of how long it takes for the substance to leave the body entirely – according to the manufacturers, it should be three or four days, but it might be several months. So now there may be mitigation for those who showed between 1 and 15 micrograms per milliletre before March 1, or less than 1 microgram per milliletre since March 1…

But the lingering presence of meldonium may also be down to sportsmen and women taking it continuously over a period of years - Grindeks, the Latvian manufacturers of this cardiac drug have said standard treatment involved courses of four-to-six weeks, perhaps two or three times a year. Or it could stem from sportsmen and women taking over the recommended dosage.

It’s a hideous scientific and moral mess, but I’m sure it’s nothing that five years of controversy and a raft of increasingly costly court cases instigated by athletes with financial backing from, say, Nike or a Russian sporting federation can’t sort out.)

Anyway, yes - Little Stoke Parish Council have got it hideously, almost hilariously wrong - although of course it is no laughing matter. The vote was 6-4, mind you. I fancy there will be some tense councillors staring fixedly out into the darkness of their back gardens as they wash up tonight, their thoughts perhaps turning to reconsideration. It will only take one…

The ideal, of course, would be for some suitably unfit councillor to see the light, annul the majority and then become a parkrun convert. It’s looking more likely than a swift end to the meldonium mess right now…