I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard half of the England football squad, Joe Wickes, doctor Raj, Piers Morgan and Katie Price telling me that I must ‘listen to my body’ whilst I exercise. Well, I’ve tried it and, quite honestly, all it does is moan: ‘You’re going too fast,’ ‘You’re going too slow,’ ‘I’m feeling dizzy,’ ‘Ooh look, an ice cream van…’ It is also easily distracted. Worse yet is my brain. Brains, I have discovered, are not easy company for those taking exercise. Unlike the rest of the body, they become easily bored. Give your legs a simple job to do, e.g. running, and they will do it until they drop, but the minute the brain gets involved, everything goes to pot: ‘Are you ok leg? I sense that you are feeling a little bit hot/tired/wobbly. Would you like me to tell him to slow down? Would you like me to register that knee twinge? Should I make him aware that total collapse is just around the corner? If I have a word, I can almost certainly make the other knee come out in sympathy…’ The problem is, I can find no way of listening to my body other than through my brain and, fundamentally, listening to my brain is like listening to a speech from a Trades Union Congress Conference in the 1970’s – lots and lots of worthy words, but very little in the way of light relief, lots of beer and sandwiches but not enough smashed avocado on toast: big shoulders, even bigger chips.
And anyway, if I’m going to waste time in listening to what my body has to say, perhaps it ought to take a little time to listen to me. I tell it we need to be careful with what we eat and it says ‘Give me chocolate!’ I tell it we need to watch what we drink and it opens the whisky. I tell my body that we’re feeling good, and it seriously begs to differ. I tell it that I am about to die and it laughs in my face, tells me to get a grip, but I know that my brain is just filtering out the messages it is being sent by my limbs, lungs and assorted lights. Basically, all that my body wants to do is to tell me that I am wrong – and I have a life-full of people willing to do that for me. I play music whilst I run simply to stop it haranguing me. Frankly, if my body wants to talk to me it can either shout or wait until I get home and then it can speak to my wife. I don’t want to hear it…
The first entry in the Running Diary ‘Couch to 5k’ is here.
Continuing the rather more fanciful little spate of zoo poems aimed more directly at children.
This thing is like two balls of string With half a horse between. Its head is like a cream éclair; Its feet like butter beans.
A tail of green, a mane of blue, With spots along its back – A cheerful disposition Although its mood is black.
It could be `He’, it could be `She’, It could be `Them’ or `They’ (I think it knows the answer But is not inclined to say).
Its eyes are green, like tangerines, It hasn’t any hair. It’s really very common Although extremely rare.
In fact, I’ve never seen one, I promise you, it’s true, And if you stay awake all night You’ll never see one too!
Q. What is it?
A. I haven’t the faintest idea.
I’ve always written ‘children’s poems’ (even when I’m trying to do otherwise, my output seldom rises above the infantile). The absence of any call for logic is incredibly refreshing and saves hours of time in Wikipedia research. Spike Milligan had the greatest gift of writing for the child in all adults. It is something to which we should all aspire…
“…You know the sensation, it’s a spark of light; barely perceptible, like a camera flash from behind you: sharp, sudden, no afterglow, just the sensation that for a split-second there has been a crack in the darkness and time has frozen just for you. Nothing more than a nano-second, but you’re aware that something – you can never quite put your finger on what thing – but something is not exactly as you left it. And you find yourself wondering what could have happened? Where you could have been? What you could have done? Still not entirely sure, really not at all certain, that anything has actually happened at all… Well, that’s what happened.
As usual, I took a circuit of the house, checked the doors and windows, peered out into the street, that kind of thing. I don’t need to turn on the lights; the vestigial glow of stand-by lamps is always enough to guide me. My attention was caught by everything and by nothing. The everyday contents of the house introduced itself to me piece-by-piece; imprinted itself onto my memory, slightly adrift of its normal position, but somehow unmoved. My home was speaking to me, article by article, trinket by trinket, memory by memory, telling me “Take a good look around you. Not one thing in here is yours. You own it all, but none of it is yours. You live here, but you don’t inhabit an inch of the fabric. When you go, there’ll be no sign that you ever lived here.”
This revelation, of course, was not instant. There was no thunder flash, no sudden awareness, no insight; my brain just doesn’t work like that. It can just about cope with a slow, oozing seepage of relevant information and that is what it does; it just about copes. Regardless of the pace at which facts are thrown at me, my head allows them to enter only at its own pace: when it has had enough, it shuts down. Anything mid-process is disregarded until it wakes me up in the middle of the night, with the kind of nagging urgency that is associated only with the need for food, sex or urination.
I remembered a story I had read once, one of those comic-book things I think, about a man for whom time stood still whilst the world carried on, unaffected, around him. Unfortunately, I couldn’t actually remember what had happened, why it had happened or how it had ended. I was fairly certain that there was some sort of moral attached to it, but I had no idea what that might be. I couldn’t focus. My brain had decided to do the shutting-down thing. It was telling me, in no uncertain terms, ‘Ok, I’ll hold everything together here, just long enough for you to get back to bed. But don’t take long mind or you’ll wake up with a very sore neck again, pins and needles in your legs, the pattern of the cat-flap embossed upon your forehead…’
Keeping a person awake for long enough to get to their bed is, you would think, a relatively mundane task for a brain. Linking forward motion to ocular input should be a piece of cake to the average lump of grey matter. Thirty billion neurons working as a team should surely be able to get a person to the bedroom without skinning the full length of their shin on a doorframe that hasn’t moved from the day that the house was built. The knowledge that your own brain hates you, is willing to do you harm, does not sit easily in the darkness hours. It can lead to worry. It can lead to neurosis. It can lead to just one small glass of whisky to help you sleep – if only any number of certain death traps did not lie between the fragile flesh and bone and the water of life. I took my shattered limb back to my bachelor bed.
I had moved from the marital bed and into the single bed in the spare bedroom as soon as it became clear to me that my wife was never coming home. I found it easier to sleep without space. There is something cocoon-like about a single bed. The early morning spaces that I stare into are not infinite in this tiny room. The walls and ceilings are always visible; even with my eyes closed I can see them. When I move, I can feel them. They are solid and dependable the walls of my little womb. Even when I dream, they do not move. They hold my little world and cradle it securely within its box-room universe.
The final stretch of my journey to sleep was illuminated by the mega-watt output of my bedside alarm, which was set, as always, ten minutes fast. The alarm itself set ten minutes early to allow for one cycle under the snooze button and a further ten minutes early just in case something went wrong with the snooze button and it decided to let me nap on for a full eighteen minutes. It was pointing as always towards the wall so that I couldn’t see the flashing green figures that illuminated its front, which meant that it was useless for time-keeping purposes, but absolutely ideal for strobe lighting the whole room metronomically from midnight to mid-day. I climbed between the sheets and looked over to the corner of the room with the small pile of books and cd’s which, outside of my clothes, and despite the three years that had elapsed since my wife’s departure, were the only things that were truly mine. They pulsed with the light, seeming to move forward and backwards like flotsam on the ebb and flow of radiance – looming out at me before scuttling back into the shadows like a… like a… well, like a really sinister pile of books and CD’s… I made a mental note to move them in the morning. I filed the mental note in the special compartment of my brain, along with all the other mental notes that were never acted upon; the reminders to cut my toe nails, trim my nasal hairs and pay the milkman. I wondered for a moment why I had not removed any of the things that I so despised: the furniture that I loathed; the pictures that made me cringe; the wallpaper that made my head spin. Was I hoping she would return? I don’t think so. The sexual pleasure that I had got from burning all of her underwear in the bath was far greater than any I remember whilst she was there.
Laziness, that was the truth. Inertia. The inability to do anything that required an actual decision outside of whether to microwave my curry from the tin or from the freezer; whether to drink my beer at the pub or in front of the TV; whether I could stretch another day out of these socks. I was surrounded by all these things I loathed simply because moving them would require me to take positive action of some kind – and the only thing I was positive about was that I was still not up to that.
I closed my eyes, decided what I wanted to dream about – a trick I perfected as a child – and allowed my body to become heavy, to sink into the mattress as my mind drifted away into… into… Why do my legs always do that? What makes them twitch like that? Another night and yet again the trick I learned as an adult – lying awake, counting the ripples in the artex ceiling and worrying about my aching, twitching legs…”
Having tired myself in the effort to find a reason not to do so, I eventually went for a run. I had procrastinated for an hour and dawdled through sixty minutes more, but somewhat against my fondest hopes, everything eventually fell into place and I made it through the door – only to return immediately in order to don cap, sunglasses and Factor 30, owing to the fact that the sun had crept higher into the sky during my protracted preparations raising the temperature from balmy to totally unsuitable for an ageing carrot-top to run in, however, my will had now been sapped to such an extent that I could not bear to back out completely. If it meant that I did not have to relive the previous two hours of angst, then sunstroke was an acceptable price to pay.
I am not certain where time goes when I am getting ready to run: one minute I am trying to decide what shirt I need to wear, the next minute, it is an hour later and I’m wandering around the house in my pants, trying to remember where I left my shorts. By the time I have got myself together, my running shoes are often in another time zone. A half hour run requires a preparation time of at least an hour. If I ever run a marathon I will have to book a week off work. Although if I ever was to run a marathon, the hours before the run would have little to compare with those that follow which, I fear, would seem very much longer to those that had to live with me. Not that there is much chance of that – marathon-wise I already have all of my excuse-ducks in a row:
Although history has shown that I am technically not too old to run a marathon, common sense decrees that I am far too old to run a first marathon.
My attention span is (at best) about ninety minutes. As a marathon would take me somewhere around the seven hour mark, there is every chance that I would forget what I was doing and stop for a pie and a pint along the way.
Given my aptitude for falling over, I would almost certainly over the twenty six miles distance find more than ample opportunity to come a proper cropper – and tarmac roads are very hard.
I live in morbid fear of the kind of shame that would accompany a three kilometre capitulation.
If I should, by some miracle, make it beyond the half way mark, it would be in a time that would ensure that all the paramedics had given up and gone home before I needed them.
So, my current timetable is unlikely to vary: 30 minutes or so to run the 5km that constitutes my regular hobble, Lord alone knows how long getting ready for it, twenty minutes to shower afterwards and ten minutes for a recuperative ice cream before I am sufficiently revived to turn the coffee machine on.
As usual, the Writer’s Circle Games Night had descended into chaos, aided on this occasion by Kenny’s decision to list the evening as a charity event (‘They’re all bloody charity cases, if you ask me.’) and thus allow alcoholic beverages to be drunk, although not purchased upstairs. (‘There’s only one of me you know and you’ll find me downstairs with the pumps and the till, not running up and down the stairs at the whim of a group of losers.’) The search for the missing Scrabble letter ‘X’ had been a long and (by Writer’s Circle standards) uproarious one, driven on by Deidre who had ‘E’, ‘N’, ‘N’ and ‘O’ and was determined to stand a chance, at least, of banging ‘XENON’ down on a triple word score. Her natural irritability was not exactly eased by Phil and Elizabeth who inexplicably suffered a serious attack of ‘the giggles’ when Elizabeth accidentally knocked a box of dominoes from the shelf and found, in amongst the widely distributed dominoes, a Scrabble ‘T’ which, as far as anyone could see, wasn’t actually missing in the first place. “Here,” said Phil, holding out the tile to Deidre, ‘You might as well take this. You could at least get ‘TENON’.” “Or ‘NONET’ said Elizabeth. “Is that a real word?’ asked Phil. Elizabeth opened her mouth to reply. “You shouldn’t have been looking at my tiles,” snapped Deidre. “Oh come on, Deidre,” said Phil. “I couldn’t miss them; you left them on the table. Besides, even if we do find the ‘X’, you’ll have to get hold of it before Elizabeth, otherwise she’s going to get ‘SPANX’.” Elizabeth took a playful swipe at Phil who ducked and, much to the amusement of both of them, dislodged the ‘X’ tile from the folds of his sweater. Deidre stared coldly at the two of them, giggling like teenagers. “Well, I think we’d better start all over again, don’t you?” she said, beckoning Frankie to rejoin them at the table.
Frankie had, in fact, played no part in the search for the missing ‘X’ as he had found himself at the next table, alongside Billy and Terry who were staring blankly at a chess board. “You’re telling me that you having decided to play chess, you discover that neither of you have ever played before?” He looked from Billy to Terry incredulously. “… Never?” He sighed, took a seat between them and, after a deep breath, attempted to introduce them to the simplest rudiments of the game. Both men nodded sagely as Frankie explained, “The game is all about protecting your King: it’s an old game – I’m surprised that both Kings are not white really – and the Queen is your most powerful piece, she can go any distance across the board, in any direction, straight or diagonally, but she can’t go through or over other pieces. If she reaches your own piece, she stops, if she reaches your opponent’s, she takes it off the board. The Knight is the only piece that can go over or round other pieces. It moves like this… or this… or this… or this…”
Penny stared at her opponents – Vanessa, Tom, Louise, Jeff and Jane – across the Cluedo board and tried to decide where her main competition was going to come from. She was, for once, pleased to find that Phil – the detective writer – was otherwise engaged, but thought that Louise and Jane could both offer stiff competition. Vanessa appeared confident (but was actually just confused) whilst Tom and Jeff – who was laughing so heartily at something (Not even he appeared to know what.) that he was slowly dripping a puddle of gin and tonic into his crotch – simply seemed pleased to be involved. The initial barrier to starting the game had still to be crossed: the positioning of the six ‘weapons’ on the board. Jane was insistent that they should start in ‘appropriate’ rooms: “Knife in the Kitchen, Candlestick in the Ballroom, it’s obvious.” “Spanner in the Garage, Pistol in the Shooting Gallery…” said Tom. “Lead Pipe?” asked Jeff. “Outside Toilet,” said Tom, which amused them both. “Yes, well, I think it would make more sense if they went into rooms that actually exist on the board,” said Jane. “Can we all agree, at least, that the Candlestick belongs in the Ballroom?” They couldn’t. Tom wanted it in the Library and Louise in the Lounge. “My mother,” she said, “Always kept the best silver in the lounge… and the knife has to be in the Dining Room.” “Maybe we could start with the rope,” said Vanessa. “Any suggestions?” “I don’t know,” said Louise. “Who even has a rope in the house? I can never even find string. And how long is that rope, even to scale? It would never go round somebody’s neck…” Eventually they all agreed to pick a murder weapon each, at random, and they placed them in a room of their choice, which resulted in the Candlestick being in the ballroom ‘Because that’s where the piano is’; the Revolver in the Study ‘Because it’s always in a desk drawer on the telly’; the Lead Pipe in the Cellar where it had ‘Fallen from the old boiler when they fitted a new one’; the Dagger was in the Dining Room because Tom had drawn it and he wasn’t about to change his mind; the Rope in the Library ‘Having fallen off the bell-pull’, and the Spanner in the Billiard Room ‘In case the table’s legs needed adjustment’. “OK, so who’s got the dice?” asked Jane. Accusing glances passed around the group. “Anyone?”
Billy and Terry both grinned nervously as Frankie drove on. “The Bishop moves diagonally, the Rook or Castle in a straight line.” They cupped their chins and stared intently at the board, occasionally reaching out and moving the pieces along the lines of the instructions…
A thorough search of the Cluedo box revealed a single die trapped within its cardboard tomb. “Can we play with just one?” asked Jeff. “It will take an awful long time to get around,” said Tom. “Perhaps we could each roll it twice,” suggested Vanessa. “Brilliant!” said Tom, who was now in full-on ‘charm’ mode. “So, who wants to be Colonel Mustard?”
Eventually, at the insistent beckoning of Deidre, Frankie left Billy and Terry to their game. “Do you think you will, at least, be able to give it a bit of a go?” he asked. Billy and Terry nodded in unison. Slowly they placed all of the pieces onto the board and, thrilled with their accomplishment, shook hands before commencing a simple game of draughts. “What will we do if one of the pieces is crowned?” asked Billy. “We’ll swap it for a King or a Queen,” said Terry. “But they’re already crowned.” “You’re right,” said Terry. “We’ll promote a Knight. A Bishop wouldn’t be ruthless enough and a Pawn would be unseemly…” They both grinned agreement and began sliding pieces around the board in a random fashion. “Do they go on black or white?” asked Billy. “Yes,” said Terry. “Black or white, definitely…”
At the Scrabble board, Deidre had once again taken control. “Right,” she said. “I think it is you to start, Francis. What have you got?” Frankie looked at his tiles: ‘A’, ‘C’, ‘F’, ‘K’, ‘L’, ‘L’ ‘U’. “Fuck all,” he said.
…Downstairs, Kenny was playing darts with a man in a tired business suit, who was asking a lot of questions about somebody who sounded a lot like Tom. Fortunately, as Kenny was able to assure the man, he’d never been seen in his pub. “Sounds like a bit of a loser, anyway,” he said…
I think many of my readers will know Draughts as Checkers and Cluedo as Clue – and if you have one, I’d be pleased to know about it
I went for a slightly ‘troubled’ run at the end of last week whence I discovered that my lungs have not yet quite worked themselves back up to absorbing oxygen in the required manner and my hips are in desperate need of WD40, so it was decided that I need to reintroduce myself to the thrice weekly slog a little more gently. Consequently I reset ‘Couch to 5k’ and I intend to ‘redo’ the last few weeks of the regime until I get back up to speed. I have removed the ever-soothing tones of Jo Whiley and replaced them with the slightly more chiding contributions of Sarah Millican. The short ‘walking’ interludes (I have started at week 5 which sees me ending the week with a twenty minute run) are a little embarrassing, and always coincide with encounters with other runners, but do give me the opportunity to whip my ailing alveoli into accepting some suitable level of oxygen exchange before I lurch on again.
I have always ‘suffered with my chest’ but this is the first time I have really noticed how long it takes to build back up to normal function after it has divested itself of whatever it is it stores in there – although to be honest I have never been one to push my ability to breathe further than has seemed natural. In forty years of playing football, I seldom moved beyond canter, even at my fittest. I always managed to position myself alongside ‘willing runners’, affording myself the maximum opportunity to kick the opposition without having to chase them around too much first. I figured that, as breathing was the only thing actually keeping me alive, being out of breath was unlikely to ever be a good thing.
My legs, I have mentioned before, have something of the ‘tree trunk’ about them. They are ‘sturdy’ in the extreme and, I fear, not ideally suited to running – probably more designed for holding up a motorway bridge. My calf muscles alone must consume about fifty percent of the oxygen that I do manage to take on board. Moreover, when given the opportunity to utilise an amount of oxygen, they generally seem to enjoy it to such an extent that they continue to flap around all night. It is incredibly annoying (possibly more for my wife than myself) when my legs are still pounding the streets whilst the rest of me searches for sleep. I have tried so many ways of combating this: hot baths, cold baths, super-hydration (leading to super-micturition), standing, sitting, heating, cooling, beating with birch twigs, giving a stern talking-to, but to little avail. My legs have no speed control and whilst they are unhappy to lumber up to a pace that is anything in excess of brisk stroll, they are, having done so, generally unwilling to return to anything resembling inertia. If I do manage to tie the damn things down overnight, they repay me by aching and, occasionally, cramping up in such a manner that a blacksmith could use them as an anvil.
My hips are relative newcomers to this circle of pain, but boy are they making up for it now. I have developed a hip-flexing and stretching exercise routine which fits between my runs and my hips have been much better, but whilst I was not running, I was also not doing the in-between stuff. Hence my hips have become like rusted gate hinges and they make a similar noise when I walk. I desperately need to get them back into some kind of order so that I can get out of the car without groaning; so that I can bend over without next door’s cat thinking that somebody is shooting at it.
I’m hoping that my second lope through the latter stages of Couch to 5k will be somewhat easier than my first: I am somewhat more adjusted to the levels of discomfort and boredom, having developed the distraction techniques needed to cancel out both. I may stumble on through the schedule, to the end of week nine, or I may find that I am back up to speed (relative term*) before then and decide to drop back into the old routine. Either way, I am actually feeling keen to get back to my established routine of runs and exercise before winter descends.
Penny smoothed down the perceived creases in her neatly pleated skirt. She was certain that nobody had noticed, but it was new and just a very few centimetres shorter in length than those she habitually wore. She felt somehow empowered by it. She had caught a sideways glimpse of herself in the mirror in the Ladies and she thought that her legs were actually nothing like as ‘stringy’ as her mother always told her. She had seen worse, much worse, and although the skirt gave her a little difficulty in keeping her knees covered when she sat down, she was happy with the way she looked. She felt suddenly hot and thought about opening the top button on her blouse. Just briefly. Steady now Penny, just one step at a time…
Shyly she looked around the Circle (all of whom had noted the new skirt) and almost sat straight down, but she caught sight of Deidre who was clearly ready to speak, and decided to press on. “I drew,” she said, “Family Saga, and I would be lying if I said that I really knew what that meant. First I thought ‘Gone with the Wind’ and then I thought of ‘The Waltons’, but I knew that I was only going to write a few hundred words, and ‘Saga’ didn’t really seem to apply. So, I hope that nobody minds, but I intend to take a bit of a liberty and take myself even further out of my comfort zone…” “Oh God,” muttered Deidre, “What is it, a poem about cats?” “…by writing this. I think you will all agree that it is not what I’m used to doing, but I listened to Frankie and he said that I needed to ‘lighten up’.” She looked to Frankie for support and he smiled warmly and nodded his approval. “I know what everybody thinks of me and, frankly, you’re not really wrong, so I tried to remember how I used to be; what I used to like and, somehow, for some reason, I came up with this and… well, Phil has agreed to help me ‘act’ it. I hope nobody minds…” She smiled at Phil who took his cue to stand, grasping a sheaf of papers in his hand. “We grabbed a few minutes ‘rehearsal’ before you all got here. I don’t know about Phil, but I have never acted before – not even in the school nativity – so please be patient. I will have to set the scene. It is an old-fashioned bookshop. Phil is the owner and I am the customer. I hope you will bear with me; I’m no actor and this is… well, I hope you will bear with me.” She and Phil moved into position, each grasping their script and a book in a bag.
PHIL Ah good morning madam. May I be of service? PENNY Yes, it’s about this vegetarian cook book you sold me yesterday. PHIL Yes madam. PENNY REMOVES A VERY DOG-EARED COOK BOOK FROM THE BAG. PHIL LOOKS AT THE BOOK AND THEN ENQUIRINGLY PENNY. PENNY It’s an ordinary cookbook with all the meat recipes torn out. PHIL Your point being…? PENNY Well, it’s not the same as a vegetarian cook book, is it? PHIL I’m afraid you’ll have to help me there. PENNY Well, a vegetarian cook book is a carefully selected and varied collection of non-meat recipes, whilst this… PHIL Yes madam? PENNY … this is a carnivorous jamboree with everything but the lentils ripped out of it. PHIL (Under his breath) Not unlike the average vegetarian fruitcake’s diet, I’d say. Perhaps, madam, you could tell me exactly what it is you were expecting. PENNY Well, I wanted a book of recipe ideas, especially designed for vegetarian consumption, which I could cook for my son’s non-meat eating girlfriend when she comes to stay at the weekend… PHIL LOOKS POINTEDLY AT THE BOOK. PENNY (cont) … that doesn’t say ‘100 favourite meat recipes’ on the cover. I don’t think I’m going to get very far with a recipe for Steak & Kidney Pie with ‘Steak & Kidney’ Tipp-Exed out and the words ‘Some Vegetarian Rubbish’ written over it in biro. Nor, I think, will she find (SHE TURNS THE PAGE) and I quote ‘Beef Stroganoff with all the good bits picked out’ particularly to her taste. PHIL Right, well, I’ll just throw this one away then shall I? MELODRAMATICALLY, HE THROWS THE BOOK INTO THE BIN. PHIL (cont) Another week’s profit down the drain. PENNY Oh come on. It’s not the first time you’ve tried it on with me, is it? PHIL What do you mean? PENNY The whodunnit you sold me last week… PHIL Yes? PENNY 2019’s ‘Wisden’ with the last page torn out… And what about the ‘Da Vinci Code’? Did you really think that I wouldn’t realise that it was just a remaindered travel book about Venice with half the words cut out and stuck back in at random? PHIL Alright, what do you want? PENNY Have you got the latest Jeffrey Archer? PHIL REACHES INTO HIS BAG AND PULLS OUT A PRISTINE PAPERBACK. PENNY Can you cut all the crap out for me? WITH A WEARY SIGH PHIL TEARS OFF THE FRONT COVER AND PUTS JUST THAT IN THE BAG, WHICH HE HANDS TO PENNY. HE THROWS THE REST INTO THE BIN. PENNY Thanks SHE ‘EXITS’.
In the ensuing silence, both Phil and Penny retook their chairs. Penny looked down at her exposed knees and Phil cast his eyes slowly around the Circle. Frankie clapped. “Bravo,” he said, and he stood. Phil joined him, clapping loudly. One by one the rest of the Circle stood and joined in the applause with even the reluctant Deidre belatedly joining in. Penny, with half a smile, took a deep inward breath and slowly pulled down the hem on her skirt…
N.B. I’m sure that Crispin Underfelt has mentioned before the difficulty of getting sketches to format for WordPress. This is the best that I can muster. I hope that it is, at least, understandable.
Wednesday was to be my first proper running day since I was first unwell – except it wasn’t. I have had a few sessions on the exercise bike and I no longer get out of breath hoisting myself into the saddle so the time felt right, but it is not. When I run, I run alone. I avoid other people as far as I possibly can and it has lately occurred to me that, should I keel over, I am many lifetimes away from a defibrillator. I am fully aware that the benefits of running far outweigh the risks, but you have to be honest, the benefits are not quite so… terminal. The pay-off of keeping fit may, if I am lucky, stretch twenty years into the future; the perils, if I am not, may stretch six feet into a box.
Exercise so far this week has consisted of being grandad. Of being used as a trampoline by two three-year olds and football/tennis/cricket opponent by a six year-old. I haven’t counted the baby, although God knows, the amount of walking up and down the room I do whilst holding her must count for something. Being grandad is much more fun than running, but twice as tiring. I have a ‘babysitting’ mode on my Fitbit that just says ‘Go and have a lie down’ every thirty minutes. I would like to introduce the physicist, searching for the secret to perpetual motion, to my grandson. Even when his body is stationary, his mind is moving at a frightening pace. He is capable of the kind of leaps of logic that would make Einstein blanch. You want to witness something moving faster than the speed of light, look inside his head whilst he’s sleeping. While the world slumbers, he hatches plans for rocket-powered shoes, upscaled building projects based on super-sized Lego and the possibility of growing chocolate from Smarties. An hour in his company is both life-enhancing and draining beyond belief. My spirits soar whilst my head throbs and my limbs ache.
I will not have run today either because I will have been at work and a day at work starts and ends with a long walk. When the sun shines, the morning walk is a golden thirty minutes, when it rains it is filled with the misery of knowing that I am going to be damp for the rest of the day. There is something about the water that runs down your back and into your pants that means that it can never dry – like badly stirred gloss paint on a plastic door. The journey back to the car on such a day, wet-panted, is never pleasant even if the sun shines. Steaming underwear is never comfortable.
Tomorrow, however, I am not at work. Tomorrow I will run. Next week’s running diary may well not be about running, but it will at least have its seeds in a run, and whether my pants are wet or dry and as long as I make it to the end without the attentions of the paramedics, you will hear all about it.
Ain’t life grand?
In an attempt to ‘glam up’ my content, I thought I’d try to post this piece with an intriguing title. I toyed with ‘Quantum Fluctuations of Time within the Somnambulant Cerebral Cortex’ but I was worried that someone might ask me to explain. I considered ‘The Mortal Coil: How to Shuffle Off – the Facts’ but I was held back by the fact that, by and large, these blogs are not, in fact, fact-heavy, but rather more fact-less. I then took a leaf from Bryntin’s book and went for ‘Easy Blogging Tips for Successful Lifestyle Investments’ but I feared litigation, so I went for the ‘what it says on the tin’ approach, which means that we can keep it to ourselves. Just the two of us…
The poison dart frog has a many-hued coat That you really wouldn’t want to have stuck in your throat
It has always puzzled me why a tiny little frog should contain enough poison to kill ten fully grown adult humans. What on earth is nature trying to protect them against? A dinner party? Ten French people willing to munch five to a leg? I understand in nature that bright colours warn of toxicity, so why aren’t butterflies weaponised? Why do Black Widow Spiders carry enough venom to kill a human, when all they need to see off is a fly? What’s more, if you’re a spider a spider who has just killed a fly with sufficient venom to bring down a human, how do you then eat it without suffering the consequences? How did nature choose the venomous? Why did she miss politicians? Thank God she did…
BTW in case you ever wondered, a frog in the throat is a simple literal allusion to the fact that you sound croaky.
P.S. I do understand the difference between poisonous and venomous – although I’m not convinced that the frog does.
The most important thing I have to remember when I run is that I have to think about something – anything – else. Absolutely the worst thing I can do is to think about running. If I do, it takes only a couple of hundred yards before I become conscious of my knees – was that a twinge? Are they getting ready to collapse? – and by the time I reach the top corner my mind has moved onto my breathing – is it laboured? Is that my chest or has somebody just driven past me in a van with no exhaust? – half a kilometre thinking about running and I can feel my heart pounding in my chest like a clog dancer with no sense of rhythm.
Now, I am of an age – my body has been ravaged more often than Moll Flanders – and I see myself as the kind of bike that I used to ride as a youth: held together with string and sticky tape, and I am never certain which part is going to let me down first. It is only if I allow myself to become confident that a wheel falls off. The more I think about it, the closer disaster moves.
My mind tells me that I will not fall to pieces as long as I don’t think about falling to pieces, so I think about something else: how big are Bruce Banner’s pants that he can still wear them after he has become The Hulk? And why are they so tatty? The last time my pants looked like that I was sixteen and had just spent two weeks camping in the Lake District with all my worldly possessions in a plastic carrier bag. I used them for a bonfire on my last night and they burned for three weeks. It is not a good train of thought because it always leads to my current under-trolley arrangements and I become aware of the current direction of travel. Thinking about underwear is never a good idea whilst running and will always lead to discomfort. (And, by the way, as you get older you will begin to realise that shorts with ‘built in support’ are never up to the job*.) Far better to concentrate on the outer attire of other runners: those who have only recently decided to start running and have consequently thrown the cheque book at the local sports outfitters and those who have been running for years and realise that the tatty green number is by far the most comfortable top they have, that nothing chafes quite like an embroidered trade mark. There are those who perpetually run in sunglasses (I have worn sunglasses myself and it is only when the sun disappears that you realise that you have nowhere to put the bloody things) those who wear a cap to fasten down unruly hair and those who wear a cap to disguise the fact that the days of unruly hair are long behind them. Those who, like me, trudge along, elastic dressing on every conceivable joint, carrying the weight of the world on emaciated shoulders, and those who bound along like a youthful Bambi, full of the joys of Spring, unburdened by a care in the world but, I am sure, fully aware of my loathing as they wave a cheery greeting. There are those who acknowledge me and those who fear it might be catching. I think of them all and, before I know it, the run is over and I haven’t even noticed I’ve done it. All I have to work out then is how come I have arrived home such a breathless, sweating wreck…
*No matter how unpalatable, facts are facts: you may not wish to know them, but they are still facts…
Getting On 