Odds and Sods – A Winter Warning

In accordance with the general navel-gazing nature of this little thread, today has been one of those days when I find myself with nothing much to say, and that has forced me to look back on what I have written over the past few weeks and acknowledge the fact that I have been studiously avoiding any mention of the elephant in the room* – Covid19. Whilst this dratted virus has been shaping everything I do and the way in which I am forced to do it, I have assiduously endeavoured to keep it out of these pages – not, I will admit, with total success. Why? Well, it’s not funny, is it? During lockdown I was more than happy to write about my own reactions to the situation, my own way of dealing with the threat, but never to directly address the viral cause of the particular set of obtuse behavioural peccadilloes that saw me through that time of rationed loo roll and pasta shortages. My default position in dealing with an absurd situation – even a threatening one – is to laugh at it. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.

I am fully aware that this approach offers an almost infinite variety of ways in which I can annoy people. I am conscious of my unrivalled ability to thoroughly piss people off at the best of times, but there seems to be so little I can do about it. It’s a natural aptitude. The gift that just keeps giving.

Any-old-how, to get to the point, which was… erh… oh yes, we spent a few hours on Sunday, Mrs Mc and myself, with our elder daughter and her family at their home. They live a two hour journey away from us and who can tell when the door may be closed on further visits? The grandkids like having me around – they don’t have a trampoline – and we get to feel useful by doing a few jobs around the place. I think that we are all aware that this inter-household mixing – even within families – is likely to be stopped soon, so we take what chance we can. On the drive home – in the very early evening – darkness closed in around us with startling rapidity and I realised that this is shaping up to be a very long winter indeed. One in which this virus is bound to loom large – even amongst those of us who will do all that we can to ignore it.

You have been warned!

*My grandma, queen of the mixed metaphor (although probably, in this particular case, the mixed idiom – who knows?) would always say that there was a white elephant in the room:

White Elephant – Something useless or troublesome – particularly if expensive to maintain or difficult to get rid of.
Elephant in the room – Something that everybody knows is there, but nobody chooses to mention.

Perhaps my grandma was much wiser than we ever realised…

The briefest pause for thought: the moment when you go for a midnight wee and you don’t even remember eating asparagus.

Man on the Run

For anyone who remains even remotely interested, I am still running at least three times a week. Usually I do two runs of 4k and one of 5k. Some days – mostly when I have other things I really should be doing instead – I run much further. Sadly, the shit is still there on my return. Some days, when the weather is bad, I don’t run as far, but I run faster – always taking great care not to trip over my own halo. I don’t actually enjoy the running any more than I ever did, but I do now go out secure in the knowledge that short of any mishap, I will finish the run and the chances are fairly good that I will not die on the way.

Sadly, I have now developed a routine associated with run days which, if I am honest, is starting to border on ritual. I wear the same things, I follow the same route, I listen to the same songs. I really must shake it up. I am beginning to annoy myself and normally, of course, I find myself the very best of company. If anyone has a life available, I should probably get one – but I shan’t be looking today, because just at the moment I have deeper concerns.

You see, since finishing the Couch to 5k programme, I have tried, as best I am able, to stick to the routine which, in addition to running three times a week, dictates that I leave a gap of at least forty-eight hours between runs. I run on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so what do I do on the days in between? Well, drink whisky and eat peanuts, if I’m honest. When I decided that I needed an alternative, I tried gin and chocolate, but even I realised that that wasn’t really what it meant, and so I looked for a healthy alternative, preferably one that did not involve hummus. What I discovered was my daughter’s discarded exercise bike and my old redundant laptop. So, I have taken to climbing aboard the exercise bike on these non-running days, whilst watching Old Grey Whistle Test DVD’s: an ancient fat man amongst the decaying clutter of his garage, pedalling for all he is worth and getting nowhere fast. My whole life has become metaphor.

Consider my garage. It is chock-full of junk. If I manage to cram something new into one end of it, it is highly likely that something else, completely unconnected, will pop out at the other. Whatever does make it in, is inevitably lost within hours, never to be found again until I trip over it some years later whilst searching for something else entirely. Occasionally I will find a space in there, but I will have no idea of what used to fill it. If I fill the gap, I knock over and break something else in the process. When I do, eventually, find what has gone missing, it will no longer fit back in. At the risk of labouring the point, my garage in no way now fulfils its primary purpose of storing a car: it is full of general rammel, little of which belongs there, but all of which stops it being used for what it was designed for.

Consider my exercise bike. It is not, as I have mentioned, actually my own. It requires a lot of effort to get it going and, when I do, it goes nowhere. It is noisy, unsightly and boring. When I have nowhere to run, I pedal to the same place and when I get there, I’ve got nowhere to go but back. I think that in future I should mount the static velocipede only when it is not safe for me to run e.g. when there is weather outside. (My wife lives in constant fear of me falling over. I haven’t done so yet, but when I do, she will have earned the right to be there at my side, with a nicely supportive ‘I told you so.’) Worse, I’ve just caught sight of myself in the mirror. I look pretty much the same as I did six months ago, and I feel pretty much the same, so where does all of this pain and anguish leave me anyway? Well, I certainly have a very fit pair of legs – they have to be, they carry about my lard-arse top half, which currently gets no exercise at all outside of lifting food to my mouth, so perhaps I need to buy some weights: dumbbells, or a heavier TV remote…

Actually, I think I’ve changed my mind. Has anybody seen a life around here that I can have after all?

The previous running diary instalment ‘Yet More Random Running Thoughts’ is here.
The next running diary instalment ‘Foot Where?’ is here.
The whole sorry saga begins here.

Different Eyes

I write chaotically; sometimes frighteningly quickly, sometimes in a monosyllabic dirge that emerges at the speed of jelly dripping through a sock, so I occasionally maintain control over my publication dates by scheduling pieces in advance, to maintain some kind of order to my output. If my publication timetable was anything like as erratic as my writing schedule, then none of us would know what day it was. The one downfall of maintaining order in this way is that occasionally I am forced to ‘pull’ a blog because the same subject has been covered by a different writer in the meantime. Normally, it doesn’t matter, we are all seeing the same things through different eyes anyway, but occasionally, what we have to say aligns to such a degree that I know that I can add nothing to what has already been said and I have to use a ‘reserve’ piece instead. I have a stash from times of bounty, which I keep for my regular spells of brain-fade or holiday. They are often, I notice, more ranty than my usual posts. Probably fuelled by excessive night-caps or Donald trump.

They do not necessarily fit into the general flow of things, but that, of course, is not necessarily a ‘bad thing’. The seed that takes root and grows into each blog is normally found in its predecessor, so an ‘out of place’ post every now and then lends a pleasing serendipity to the flow. For the reader, foreknowledge is surely the worst of all evils. Perhaps a step out of line from time to time is required to keep us all on our toes.

We are all watching the same world, but our viewpoints are not the same. No single question has a definitive answer – unless it is on the very basic mathematical level, which, as my brain has never progressed beyond the absolutely basic on that score, is as far as I would feel qualified to say. Take, for instance, climate change, which, as an ongoing reality, was once the subject of serious debate. I don’t think it is now – at least not by anybody you would not expect to see wearing a red nose at the circus: the facts are there. The effect is certain, but what of the cause? If we accept that Global warming is an issue, then the question must lie elsewhere. Is it a looming man-made disaster, or is it merely a normal part of an ever-evolving natural cycle? CO² levels have, after all, been very much higher in the past, but the planet did not then support any of the (admittedly dwindling) diversity of life that it supports today. The planet can cope with the environmental changes, it does not need life to continue. It could probably do with the rest.

Anyway, aren’t we supposed to be the brainy ones: the top of the evolutionary tree? Shouldn’t we be trying to do something about it whatever the cause? Surely we cannot continue to dig whatever we want out of the ground forever. Surely we can’t keep on filling in the holes we make with plastic crap. (Now, here’s a thought. If we filled all the holes with water, would that make sea level go down?)

In truth, I’m not certain how worried we really are about animal species becoming extinct, as long as they are not something we would normally eat. Would we actually be happier living on a planet that was occupied only by ourselves and dinner? If the planet needs more trees, what if we planted fruit trees? Can you imagine our battle against drunken wasps on an early autumn planet coated in fruit trees and the buzzy cacophony of tiny wasp voices yelling, ‘Leave him Keith. He’s not worth it!’ (I’m assuming here that Keith is a popular wasp name) a planet where dawn’s great herald is not a chorus of birdsong, but a volley of wasp retching. Probably no more than we deserve…

Anyway, as the dominant intellect in the writing team that produces this blog (I know, I know) I have put my mind to finding a solution – and here is where I have arrived. As a species, we are wickedly good engineers. What if we scooped all of the plastic out of, and off, our poor benighted planet and made it into a single great pipe through which we could pump all of Earth’s excess ‘greenhouse gasses’ to Mars? Presumably Mars would then heat up and the frozen water beneath its surface would rise and we would be able to fill the planet with billions of CO² guzzling, oxygen producing trees and Bingo! In no time at all a lush green planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere into which we could send all of our wasps! Genius!

It is only one of my many plans for the future: consider a planet full of CO² and melting ice-caps of pure, cold water. Answer, all you can drink fizzy water. Polar ice-caps as the planet’s Soda Stream. Of course, the changing world would expedite the imperative for the selective evolution of polar wildlife. Penguins, for example, would probably have to learn to fly again. It should be no problem for them, they have done it before. And Polar Bears? I have a plan for them too, just as soon as I discover whether they eat wasps…

Anyway, these are my plans to save the planet: my gift to the world. I will be publishing full details very soon for peer-review on this very website – providing nobody gets there first, in which case it will probably be a rant about cats…

Yet More Random Running Thoughts – Odds and Sods…

My Cat, Lawrence.*

My cat Lawrence, he’ll never let you down.

My cat Lawrence, keeps his feet on the ground.

With my cat Lawrence, you know just where you are.

Since my Auntie Florence, ran him over in her car…

I have discovered that when running, by a method I cannot discern, my phone always plays David Bowie’s Heroes (the album version, not the dreadful ‘single edit’) at the very second I decide that I have had enough. Well, you can’t stop then, can you?

Not for the first time I find myself thinking about Thursdays.

When I first added Thursdays to my blog rota it was with the aim of using a few stray poems which I ran as Haphazardly Poetical, because that’s what they were. I planned for them to be a regular thing, but they arrived sporadically and could, only in the very broadest of senses, properly be labelled as poetry – however, as, broadly speaking, I have no sense, thus labelled they were. For reasons I have never been able to fathom, they quickly proved to be my most popular of posts, but because I am pathetically and slavishly bound by rhyme and scan, I found them difficult to write with any regularity or quality, and when I set my mind to producing them, everything else went out of the window. Consequently, Thursdays also became home for a pastiche or two (Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Winnie-the-Pooh, that sort of thing) which I rather liked, although I was in a definite minority. From time to time I wrote longer pieces which ran better over two days, so Thursdays became a day of all manner of poems, part twos and bits and bobs and, quite frankly, I began to find them a bit of a trial.

For a while I used Thursdays to republish some old, seldom read posts, which I thought merited a second chance (although, in the main, you begged to differ) and then came Covid, and Thursday became the day of The Plague Diaries, which took me right through Lockdown towards the New Normal, during which time I began to run. I have no idea why. My ‘Couch to 5k’ diary filled the next few months, and then the problem of what to do with Thursdays returned anew.

I write masses of ‘stuff’ that, for one reason or another (usually another) never gets expanded upon and, as Thursday blogs are, by and large, shorter and looser than other days, it struck me that Thursday could well become a day for some of these pieces. Some days I write pure nonsense (some?), snippets of rhyme (see top and bottom of this post), bits of script, random conversations – all of which go into a folder labelled Odds and Sods, which I have just renamed Thursday. You get my drift…

Eventually, another sparkly something will attract my attention and a new theme will, turd-like, bob to the Thursday surface, but until then you have Odds and Sods, and I, like a pioneering prospector armed only with a broken sieve, the wrong shovel and access to quite the wrong river, will pan away, searching for nuggets of gold that I might be able to fruitfully lay before you and, who knows, something that might, one day, lead somewhere else completely…

I wish us all good luck…

A Small Deception at the Vasectomy Clinic**

He smiled at me, lain on the table

And said, “Now this won’t hurt at all.”

Then rammed over 6 foot of needle

Right down my wherewithal

*I heard somebody shouting out for Lawrence from their doorstep late one night. They could, I suppose have been calling for a stray dog or husband, but something told me it was probably a cat. I started to think about how much easier cats would be to find, if they didn’t move around so much…

**Personal experience – I can say no more except to add that on the day of my ‘op’ I was prepared and splayed on the table when the surgeon and his (female) assistant entered the room, and the assistant took one look at me and said, ‘Colin? It is Colin isn’t it? I haven’t seen you in ages…’ The conversation from that point might be best described as strained and I cannot remember a time of greater relief than when I was able to gather myself together and limp, manfully from the room…

The previous running diary instalment, ‘More Random Running Thoughts’ is here.
The next running diary instalment, ‘Man on the Run’ is here.
Couch to 5k starts here.

More Random Running Thoughts – Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens…

…Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens…

Don’t ask me why, because I don’t have the answer, but yesterday as I ran, this song kept looping around in my head. Not, in case you should wonder, because I was happy, but because, I think, I had just heard it in a radio advert and I was in a state of bewilderment. You see, I know that Maria (in The Sound of Music) is a nun, but come on: bright copper kettles? Really? What is so exciting about a bright copper kettle? At least with a brown paper package tied up with string there is intrigue, jeopardy even: what is in there – a bomb, or an unexpected bottle of Scotch? A bomb would definitely not be in my list of favourite things, but I get the uncertainty, the anticipation thing. I just don’t understand why anybody would consider a copper kettle, bright or otherwise, to be a favourite thing? Surely, even in a convent, there must be more alluring objects of desire. ‘I tell you what, Sister Maria, why don’t you just pop along and make me a nice cup of tea? The kettle is ever so bright – and copper too, by the way.’ How dull does a life have to be?

Anyway, as I know very little about the desirability of apple strudel (crisp or otherwise) and even less about Schnitzel with noodles, I devoted the rest of the run to devising my own lyrics (I didn’t mess with the chorus, which seems perfectly serviceable to me – nobody cares for dog bites or bee stings, do they?) I hope Rogers and Hammerstein will forgive me (or at least not sue…)

A fresh gin and tonic with ice and a slice in,

A hot veggie chilli with plenty of spice in,

A huge bar of Galaxy (chocolate of kings),

These are a few of my favourite things.

Bright yellow pimples on other folk’s noses,

Those who fall over while striking their poses,

Drunken hen-parties with pink angel wings,

These are a few of my favourite things.

The smell in the kitchen when pizza is cooking

The mess you can make when there’s nobody looking,

Bananas and custard and conkers on strings

These are a few of my favourite things.

When the dog bites

When the bee stings

And I’m feeling sad

I simply remember my favourite things

And then I don’t feel so bad…

The feeling you get when the guests have departed,

The smile on the face of a baby that’s farted,

The news that the old folk can play on the swings,

These are a few of my favourite things.

Repeat chorus etc etc etc.

There, that’s better. Now I don’t feel so bad…

For clarity’s sake, I think I probably should point out (for the aficionados amongst you) that I am aware I have added an extra verse at the end. It was a long run. Lord knows what will stick in my head the next time I venture out, but if it’s anything to do with lonely goatherds, I may have to reappraise my entire life…

The previous running diary instalment ‘Some Immutable Laws of Life’ is here.
The next running diary instalment ‘Yet More Random Running Thoughts’ is here.
Couch to 5k starts here.

Some Immutable Laws of Life – 5k and Beyond

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash – Still not my own legs, but *almost* tatty enough.

Well, the strange thing is that I am still running and that I do now appear to have worked my way up to 5k, whilst still finding that 30 minutes marks the exact limit of my endurance. Now I am not listening to the nagging insistence of the Couch to 5k app, time actually does seem to pass a little easier. I am able to clear my head a little. Unfortunately, as with all voids, it is always on the look-out for something to fill it. This is the sort of stuff that floods into my brain as I run. It does at least take my mind off the running.

Despite what is said in the eulogies, nobody that is both bright and beautiful has friends.
You will always feel stupid at an interview.
You will always feel fat at a Spa.
Nothing that was funny in the pub will ever be funny anywhere else.
Bathroom accidents only ever happen at somebody else’s house.
A standard shopping bag doubles in weight for every one hundred yards you carry it.
Beyond the age of sixty it is impossible to experience any kind of pain without fearing death.
If you only want half of a Buy One Get One Free offer, no-one will ever offer you the free half.
According to aerodynamicists, the bumble bee cannot fly – these people design aeroplanes!
It is not cool to wear sunglasses indoors – especially if you walk into the hat stand.
She almost certainly is too good for you.
There are no recorded instances of anyone ever eating a jam doughnut without getting it down their crotch.
You do not get better as you get older, you simply become less discerning.
The only person that ever loves a loser is the winner.
A picture is never worth a thousand words – unless it is a picture of a thousand words.
Breakfast meets Brunch where the price goes up.
Vertical stripes do not make you look taller – although they do make the ground look further away.
If you have just won at Monopoly, you can be sure that nobody likes you.
Toast is always hot until you eat it.
No Man is an island – unless you count the Isle of Man.
There is only one Willy Wonka and that Willy Wonka is Gene Wilder.

I may collect these thoughts together and publish a book, like Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, but with fewer jokes. If you want to add any thoughts of your own, please feel free.

The previous Couch to 5k instalment, ‘They Think It’s All Over’ is here.
The next running diary instalment, ‘More Random Running Thoughts’ is here.
Couch to 5k starts here.

They Think It’s All Over – Couch to 5k The End of the Long Run

Well, it actually is all over. I would love to be able to tell you that it all ended in a blaze of glory, but I cannot. It was more a splutter of indifference. My knees hurt, my ankles hurt, my hip ached, my calf is sporting something that looks like a huge swollen bruise, and my bladder has still not learned to cope with the amount of water I have to drink in order to deal with thirty minutes of mouth breathing. This morning I can hardly walk. Getting fit has reduced me to a physical wreck. I don’t think that I am well enough to be fit. I am at least thirty years older than when I started this, ten weeks ago.

My big question now is, will I continue running? I don’t know, there are a number of factors to consider:

Do I enjoy it? – No, I don’t. I can honestly say that not for a single moment whilst running have I ever thought to myself, ‘What good fun I am having’. Running is torture, so why would I want to continue?
Do I feel fitter? – No, I don’t. Currently I would struggle to locate a non-aching bone in my body. I can run for thirty minutes where ten weeks ago I would not have managed thirty seconds – but I’m still struggling to understand why I would really want to. This country no longer has sabre-toothed tigers, so there’s little point. If push comes to pull there is little of danger that I can’t stroll away from.
Do I feel thinner? – Yes I do.
Do I feel better for it? – No, I feel thinner.

So will I continue? – Almost certainly yes, unless I can find some way to stop without losing face.

I clocked my final ‘Couch to 5k’ thirty minute run at 4.85 kilometres, which is far enough away from 5k to make getting there a further challenge for me, but close enough to make in achievable. This week, step by painful step, I begin eeking out my misery towards that goal. An extra 150 metres (is that correct?) – I should get there in a matter of weeks – and then, I suppose, I will have to try and speed up a bit.

My last run was in the rain and I found it so much more comfortable than my plods in the sun. I have been considering taking water with me – but I think the extra weight will involve extra training, so I will stick with the chewing gum which I always regret after about five minutes. Spitting it out is not acceptable – I work in the High Street, I have to contend with an ice-rink of the stuff in wet weather – and, although I run past a couple of bins, my eyesight is by then so bleary that I could not trust my aim at all, so I chew until my jaw aches (I wouldn’t want to leave my face out of its share of pain) and drop the tasteless little bud into my bin a few minutes after I get home – just as soon as the palpitations stop.

One thing that the Couch to 5k regime has taught me is that when I publish three blogs a week, I do not get adequate time to read those of other bloggers, so, although I do intend to keep you aware of my progress – to 5k and beyond – I probably will not do so with quite the regularity or verbosity of the last few weeks. I hope that it means I can get to read a little more of what you all have to say and, therefore, bore you to death on the comments boards instead.

Anyway, this week ten post is really just to thank you for sticking with me through this – I’m guessing it was probably more painful for you than I – never forget, They also serve who stand and allow the little ginger bloke to whinge interminably.

This post will be the last outing for the unknown runner’s legs at the head of the page, but they will not be replaced by my own legs at any future point. Outraging Public Decency still, I think, carries a prison sentence and I would not be good in prison: I am allergic to woollen blankets, porridge, communal showers and dungarees with arrows on. Mind you, if I ever managed to escape, I would at least know exactly how far away I could be in thirty minutes…

The previous Couch to 5k instalment ‘Devon Loch, That’s All I’m Saying’ is here.
The next instalment of the running diary ‘Some Immutable Laws of Life’ is here.
Couch to 5k starts here.

Devon Loch*, that’s all I’m saying – Couch to 5k week 9

It’s not much of a hill, but my house is at the top of it. It means that wherever I run, the second half of that run is always uphill – or else I don’t get home. It is of no relevance, I just wanted you to know.

On my last twenty-eight minute run of week 8, I kept going by convincing myself that when I reached ‘the end’, I would continue to run for another two minutes, in order to prove that I would be ok this week. When I got there, I couldn’t do it. The problem is that I currently run until the bell rings to tell me that I am half way home, at which point I turn around and retrace my steps: I know exactly where I should be when I finish and my entire focus over those final minutes is on getting there. When I cross that line, everything collapses around me – including me. At that point, I am no more likely to run a further thirty seconds than another thirty days. I am done. It’s like asking a man who has just climbed Everest to shimmy up a step-ladder from the summit and fit a new light bulb. If you aim to make the perfect apple crumble, does anybody actually expect you to put crushed nuts on top?

I ended last week in a bit of a panic. Circumstances beyond my control pushed me from a Wednesday run to a Thursday run. This meant that in order to maintain the regime, my final run of the week had to be on Saturday. On Saturday I work all day, I have a long walk to and from, and I was due to see one of my daughters and two of my grandchildren an hour after getting home. Could I fit a thirty eight minute session (including warm up and warm down) into that gap (particularly as my getting ready/psyching myself up/drinking lots of water/going for a last minute toilet break routine takes at least thirty minutes)?

Well, I did it. The stress of the situation took my mind off the normal certainty of failure and – other than the failure to tag an extra two minutes on – I managed ok. It was earlier than I normally run and the weather was very warm. In my panic to get on with it, I forgot my knee supports, my chewing gum and my water, but I reached the end without any hint of stopping along the way. It was the work of seconds to cleave my tongue from the roof of my mouth with a screwdriver after I had staggered home. This week, I have discovered that the entire duration of a run is spent in an internal discussion with myself over the advisability of ‘just stopping for a few seconds’ and I fear that at least half of it is argued out loud. People with dogs cross the road when they see me coming. People without dogs hide behind trees…

I have now completed two of my thirty minute runs. Tomorrow I will have finished ‘the course’ and a smugger person you will not be able to find. It remains to be seen whether I will be able to gather together the motivation to keep going now. I will keep you informed.

For my run, my musical ‘soundtrack’ consists largely of tracks that are five minutes long or more: during a thirty minute run I know that I should get through six songs. There are, though, one or two shorter ones lurking therein and I cannot articulate the pain I feel when one of them starts to play. It boots my meticulous planning right out of the window. I cannot adjust the timings in my head and breathe at the same time. After a short track has played, there is no way of calculating when I will enter the last five minutes of my personal hell – other than the voice of Jo Whiley telling me that I am just entering the last five minutes, of course – but the fury drives me on, so the shorter songs stay on the playlist. I haven’t yet had a run without at least one shorter track puncturing my schedule. When I do, it will surely infuriate me further.

One further thing I discovered this week. I really should not have tracks with quiet intros on the playlist. When they play, I can hear myself breathe – and that is very bad indeed. Nobody should sound like that unless they are wearing an aqualung.

Today I met some old friends whom I have not seen since before lockdown and they commented on my loss of weight. Like an idiot I told them that I have been running (I have previously told no-one outside of my family and my tiny roster of WP readers). They were utterly appalled. They could not have disapproved more if I had wee’d in their cocoa. After we parted, I kept checking over my shoulder, in case they had reported me to the police. I anticipated disinterest; disapproval on such a grand scale left me wondering whether I really was being reckless beyond the point of criminal culpability. At least I won’t be so easy to catch in a chase now.

*Devon Loch jumped the last fence of the Grand National in 1956 comfortably in front of the rest of the field. Inexplicably, it then fell attempting to jump a fence that did not exist in the finishing straight and did not finish.

The previous Couch to 5k instalment, ‘The Look’ is here.
The next Couch to 5k instalment, ‘They Think It’s All Over’ is here.
Couch to 5k starts here.

Working Title*

The insertion of the Couch to 5k updates into my weekly roster has meant that I have slipped back into the 3 posts-a-week routine that I was finding so hard to maintain just a few short weeks ago. Somehow, it seems to be where I keep washing ashore, but it is not really ideal. I am fully aware that some posts do not sparkle as they should – that they could do with considerable ‘smartening up’, but often there is not time. I realise also, that my normally tenuous claim to publish ‘Humour’ is at times completely untenable: this is the house that the asthmatic wolf blew down. Sometimes when I force my brain into action it produces passable, but most often it coughs up something that was specifically banned from the buses of my youth. Often I have to physically start to write before I have any idea what is going to come out. The person that appears on paper is often quite different to the one who lives between my ears.

My head has started to cobble together the skeleton of a story that I would like, given time, to develop into a novel. It is a very long time since I have done this; definitely pre-blog, and the only thing that I truly remember about the process is how very time-consuming it all is. I do not know whether it will happen yet, I very much stumble into this kind of thing, but if it does start to happen, then blogging will almost certainly diminish a little. Please bear with me. I won’t stop, but I might become intermittent. Like ringworm, I might stop itching, but I will still be there.

The book is currently called (you guessed) ‘Working Title’ but that will change several thousand times during its gestation and birth. Often the titre du jour will be a reminder of where I am going – because what I write often strays so substantially away from my meticulously detailed plot (MDP) that I know that when I next sit down to write, whatever-it-was that I intended to supersede my previous MDP, will have evaporated into the thin-air between my ears and all that I will be able to do is to return to the original MDP leaving the previous day’s labours hanging behind like some kind of evolutionary dead-end. (You may have noticed that I have quite a gift for that.) Is this how parallel universes function? (Perhaps they were constructed before God had the opportunity to fully think through all the possible eventualities – which surely makes our own universe a very parallel one indeed.) Sometimes I will particularly like a phrase that I have written and will temporarily use that as a title until I get bored of it and so consumed by its triteness, that I strike it from the manuscript completely. Sometimes I will call it Kevin.

The MDP, by the way, usually amounts to variously coloured notes on a single sheet of a notebook. I have yet to write anything that finishes quite where it was expected to; the route it takes is always at considerable variance to the one I had planned, and characters pop into my head when I least expect them to and often I like them so much that I have to find them a role that heretofore had not existed. The whole thing remains in a state of flux (Can you remain in a state of flux?) until such time as it is finished, which is when, usually, I start again. The ‘Big Joke’ often occurs to me at the very end and then has to be retrospectively woven through what I had originally written with no knowledge of it. I would like to be more organised; I have tried, but what I get is a logical progression of sterile consequences that makes me yearn for the wit and whimsy of Tolstoy and, whilst the brain is led through it all by a subconscious sat-nav – avoiding side streets, fords and unlisted cul-de-sacs – it arrives at its dénouement unchallenged and in need of half an hour in the soft-play area. I need a maze. I need dead ends and wrong ways and unexpected Follies and benches to picnic on and steps to stand on and an exit that isn’t where I expected it to be. That’s the way it is.

So each evening I sit down and read what I have written the day before and think about where I can go from there; what else might be happening elsewhere in my little world; how might somebody else have viewed the same events and then I write, with the broad sweep of where I am going in the back of my mind, but happy to let it put its feet up for a while and have a rest. I, meanwhile, attempt to harness the ephemera and persuade it to pull the cart in roughly the right direction for a little while and it’s all frighteningly unprofessional I know, but I am content with that. Nobody’s paying me after all and at least that way I know exactly what it is that I don’t have a clue about how to do… I think.

*What I put at the head of the page when I have no idea what I am going to write about – and sometimes, when I have no idea what just happened.

This is, in part, a short answer for Inkbiotic. I will return to more later…

The Look – Couch to 5k week 8

Week 8 and I’ve just realised that the photo I have been using at the top of this thread is of a female runner. I feel it necessary in these days of litigation to make it clear, they are not my legs, please do not consider approaching the person they rightfully belong to in order to discuss the content of this blog. I cannot be held responsible for any pepper-spray defence-actions should you ignore this advice. I don’t have legs like that: mine are short, very muscular and not at all something that you would wish to see in anything tight, but with only a week or two to go, I think there is little point in searching for a new image. Besides, to date, nobody has commented (meaning, I think, that they haven’t noticed or they really do think that I shimmy around on those pins) so we’ll leave well alone for now…

Well, I’m now running for twenty-eight minutes at a go, three times a week and James is right – it doesn’t hurt any more than twenty five minutes did. I don’t find it any easier but, all the same, when I set out today, it was with the quiet confidence of completing it, by hook or by crook.

It feels like a lifetime since I was able to enjoy a mid-run amble. I have quite forgotten how quickly the brain clears during those inter-lope intermissions. All that lies between warm-up and warm-down now is pain and misery: an addled brain that can think of nothing else but how much longer does this go on? My runs have settled into an unvarying routine:

Minute 1 – I’m feeling ok today
Minute 2 – I’m feeling really tired today
Minute 3 – I don’t think I can do this today
Minute 4 – I really don’t think I can do this today
Minute 5 – I can’t do this, I’ll have to stop (repeat for next twenty minutes)
Minute 26 – Three minutes left. I can do this
Minute 27 – Actually, I’m not sure that I can
Minute 28 – Don’t be so bloody stupid! (This is my reply to Jo Whiley who has just suggested that I might like to speed up for the last minute)

Next week, the last week, moves me up to thirty minute runs. It should move me up to 5k per run, but I am certain that, at my speed, it will not, so perhaps that might give me the spur to go on: to run 5k. Of course, that depends on how close to 5k I am, by then, running. If it is a long way adrift, then I clearly don’t have it in me. The question is, will I be able to motivate myself to keep running from then on? The last eight weeks have been a personal challenge, but when next week is done… I am not a runner. I don’t enjoy running, but I do enjoy proving myself wrong. At the end of next week, I hope I will have done that. What then?

Ah, but that is for next week, or possibly the week after. For this week I still have one further twenty-eight minute run to tackle before I can set about the whisky, stilton and oatcakes with a conscience so clear that not even my window cleaner could smear it.

I am still the hot and sweaty vision staggering along the village roads that I was eight weeks ago. I still do not own proper training shoes or shorts. I still set off thinking that I am going to be cold and find that I am running in the heat of Mercury by minute two. I continue to run in a ‘T’ shirt that I use for holiday snorkelling; a very old pair of tracksuit bottoms or, on warmer days, a long pair of swimming shorts, and my rescued slip-on trainers which now have one sole that has started to flap alarmingly as I run. I must do something about it.

I will buy myself some proper running garb when the present regime has finished, it may give me the incentive to continue, but it is not without risk. If I am dressed like somebody who can run, then people who see me may believe that I am, in reality, somebody who can run. They may well look at the sweating heap that approaches them at a limping lope and think, ‘Well, he’s got the garb. He obviously runs. Looking at him now, he must be in trouble. I’d better call the paramedics.’ They might be right. I am quite happy for passer’s-by to see me and think, ‘Bless, him. He looks close to death, but at least he is trying.’ Less so for them to think ‘Well look at him, stupid old fool obviously thinks that buying all the running kit is going to turn him into a runner. By the look of him he’d have done better to have bought himself a nice shroud.’ At least as I am now, it looks as if I might have set out on a whim. Nobody could guess that I have been doing this for two months without perceptible improvement.

If I do buy new trainers, I’ll just have to change my route, I guess…

The previous Couch to 5k instalment, ‘Incremental Gains’ is here.
The next Couch to 5k instalment, ‘Devon Loch, That’s All I’m Saying’ is here.
Couch to 5k starts here.