Sunday 4 September 2005

No one could ever accuse me of polyglottism, but I did manage to collect a bit of Yorkshire during the time I lived there.

‘E wooks while dinner, for instance.

This was the response when I recently enquired what hours the estate agent valuer works on a Saturday.

Translation: "He's available until midday".

It was a short stay in Huddersfield, driving up on Friday evening and returning Saturday afternoon. I'm beginning to sense that the town's grip on me is loosening at last. Let's face it, perhaps it was never that strong. Incomers aren't truly accepted until the roots of at least two generations are deep in Yorkshire soil.

Friday night I was able to enjoy the luxury of the Travelodge in Mirfield. I wondered why it was so cheap until I got there - when I was vividly reminded that this busy stretch of the A62 runs alongside the town sewage works.

The double-glazing works overtime at this place. My room admitted no noise, no smell. The relief was so powerful that I stayed awake most of the night, weighing up the pros and cons of spending the rest of my life there, rather than venturing out again. But in the morning, I remembered: I am a marathoner, and holding my nose and rushing forward like a Second Row joining a scrum, made it to the adjacent Little Chef - still conscious.

Little Chef, eh? Their staff are always interesting.

Last time I was in one, I asked what flavour ice cream was on offer. The waitress went off to the kitchen then returned with the news. "White", she said. "They're both white". It was said with such an air of alarm, that I didn't dare press the issue.

Yesterday I was approached for my order by the Saturday kid with the pudding-basin haircut. I regard myself as culturally savvy, so, avoiding eye contact, and careful not to expose my teeth, I whispered: "Beans on toast, please".

He repeated: "Beans on toast?", as though hearing the triplet for the first time. And then: "'old on a moment".

He returned with a notebook and pen. "I'll only forget", he explained. "Now. What were it again?"

Sometime later, as I munched and ruminated, he approached once more. "Is everything alright with your meal, Sir?"

"Very good", I assured him. "A breakfast classic, sublimely executed."

penny

A few hours later, after I'd finished crushing the estate agents beneath the heels of my CATs (see illustration), I went for a mooch round the flea market in Huddersfield. Up to my Adam's apple in the mostly worthless residue of other people's lives. Chipped plaster ornaments, prints of fluffy kittens, tarnished tin sugar tongs in search of a bowl, Kajagoogoo's Greatest Hits (did they have more than one?)... you know the sort of thing.

A few things did reach out and grab me though. We all have our weak points.

I spent a while running my hands over the used First World War grenade vest, wondering what horrors it had seen. And those thin, tin miners' tags from Wakefield Colliery. 1850s, 1860s. Just the year, and the miner's number stamped into it. Identity tags - in case of death.

Years ago, when I was a kid - 19 years old - I had a girlfriend who came from a mining village near Pontypridd. The Rhondda Valley. I visited her there two or three times. Her three brothers were miners in the local pit. Her father had been down the mine too, but now lived on a sofa in the downstairs back room of their council house. Dad had been retired sick, and no longer had the lung capacity even to get up the stairs. I didn't actually meet him; he never emerged from the room. But I used to hear him coughing and choking in the night. At first, I thought it was strange that his family thought so little of him. They sort of ignored him; pretended he wasn't there. He was like some mad relative locked in the basement. But after a while, I learned that most of the local mining families had inert fathers holed up somewhere nearby. It was the accepted thing. A father over 50? Still on his feet? Never been down the mines then.

I was a London kid. I'd been to Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace. The Rhondda folk, and I spoke to many who'd never travelled beyond the Valley, seemed to think that I knew everything that was worth knowing. What I knew was free to every tourist, and available to anyone in any library, almost anywhere in the world. All I did was mooch around the front window; the display case. These boys knew the really important stuff. They knew more than I would ever know, and they knew about places in a way that no library could understand.

I quickly fell in love with the huge, brown slag heaps of the Rhondda, and the mining fraternity; getting drunk in the 'NonPol' club with the sooty-cheeked lads from the pit. It was all new to me - as new to me as Dartmoor had been a year or two earlier, when I ran away for the first time. And I suppose I was running away again now, and wanted to stay away this time.

At the JobCentre, I enquired about becoming a miner. It was one of the strangest, and most humbling 'job interviews' I ever had. I queued up for ages, and eventually got to see someone. "I want to be a miner", I said.

There was a silence, while the pasty-faced girl behind the desk looked me over. Eventually, all she said was: "You're not from round here, are you?"

I remember grinning. "No, I'm from London".

There was no return grin. She looked down at the card I'd filled in. Then she held it out to me.

"Go home, Andrew".

And that was it. It was the day that I decided to end my relationship with the Rhondda, and her womenfolk.

One day, 30 trembling years from now, I'll unlock that big old suitcase in the loft, and somewhere in there I'll find the card from Rhydfelin JobCentre, and wonder what the fuck it's all about.

Back in the Huddersfield market, what did interest me, and made me think, was a stall selling pre-decimal currency. Thruppeny bits, tanners, two bobs, half crowns. It's a long time since we used them, and they were now a strangely comforting sight, despite making me feel old again.

I wondered.

I wondered if decimal coinage had helped distance us from our heritage.

When I was a kid I would gaze at Victorian pennies and their dates. 1840, 1850, 1860... 1900. As kids, we marvelled at the difference between the coins, and wondered about the lives of those who had handled this penny before us. Survivors from the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea? Jack The Ripper in foggy Spitalfields? Chirpy soldiers on their way to the French battlefields of the Great War? Famous sportsmen? Was this penny ever tossed to decide who batted first in an Ashes test?

You could lose yourself in these thoughts. This penny in your hand was a true link to your country's past.

But now? Now our coinage starts from the early 70s. How can you ponder the depths of the national psyche with a ten pence piece from 1971?

That's it, I thought, as I drove back down the M1. Decimal currency was the descending curtain that sequestered our past. It murdered the imagination of a nation's youth.

The Get Healthy Painlessly campaign has started. Still no running though.

Sunday 11 September 2005

Headaches are a pain - and if you think that's self-evident, wait till you hear this.

I've had one all day.

I've also not drunk coffee in the last 48 hours, and seemed to remember hearing that a sudden lack of caffeine could induce headaches for a while. Thought I'd research it, so scanned t'Internet for "caffeine withdrawal headache". Eventually I came across a link to a page which promised to tell me what I wanted to know.

Caffeine Withdrawal Headache - Definition, it said. And the definition of Caffeine Withdrawal Headache?

"Headaches resulting from caffeine withdrawal", apparently.

And that was it.

My enthusiasm for football seems to be draining away these days.

Yesterday I traipsed down to Southampton for the QPR match. It's terrible. You feel obliged to visit new stadia, even if it's only to witness the ritual slaughter of your own family.

I parked up in windswept Woolston, bought a couple of Kentish apples the size of small melons, and crunched my way across the Itchen Bridge, a spectacular structure spanning the Solent.

You get a good view of the new St Mary's stadium from here, and I stopped halfway across to assess the place. When Simon Inglis comes to update his fabulous classic Football Grounds of Great Britain, perhaps the greatest work in English literature, what will be left for him to drool over? Hillsborough at a push perhaps. Not much else. Where is this century's Archibald Leitch?

More interesting than the view of Southampton's boxy new ground was the long line of posters and stickers along the balustrade urging me to call the Samaritans before leaping to my death. Or instead of leaping to my death, I suppose. It didn't raise my optimism levels in advance of the match.

And after half an hour in which our goal was battered by Southampton's 7 foot forward line, life was looking even bleaker.

But then something odd happened, and in virtually our first attack of the game, the redoubtable Danny Shittu found himself unmarked on the 6 yard line, and we were in front.

Chim chiminey
Chim chiminey
Chim chim cher-oo!
'Oo needs Sol Campbell when we've got Shitt-ooo?

The Saints were suddenly punctured and useless, and despite equalising shortly afterwards, they never truly gained the upper hand again. The match continued to fizz its way to an entertaining 1-1 draw, and we went home pretty happy.

So why am I feeling my eagerness for all this receding? Nothing much to do with the football but the peripheral awfulness. We sat immediately behind a handful of teenies who spent most of the game on their feet, swearing loudly, and making what I have to presume were well-practised masturbatory gestures at the Southampton fans sitting just across the gangway.

I hate these kids, and this behaviour, with a passion. It saddens and depresses me, and makes me want to stop going.

Why does it make me uncomfortable? Is it just my cantankerous, middle-aged grumpy side oozing forth? No. I hate them because they are a constant reminder of what I used to be.

Thing is, I go to football to escape reality, not to drown in it.

Now where did I put that Samaritan's number?

Tuesday 13 September 2005

A couple of stately homes to report. Cliveden on Sunday. I've talked about this place before. I did a race here last Christmas. Loved the race, and hope to do it again this year; but Sunday's trip wasn't great. We waited ages to be allowed in to see the interior, and once inside, found that they couldn't wait to shunt us out again, through the back door.

Out on the terrace I grasped my class revenge by loitering threateningly at the large windows of the hotel, staring in at the rich people trying to enjoy their Sunday roasts. I managed to amuse myself for a minute or two this way until I noticed that one of the tables had a bottle of Chateau Palmer on the go. What a chain of thought this detonated. I have a story about Chateau Palmer; a story that, remarkably, also involves staring through a window. Not just any window but one of the windows at the chateau itself.

The story has strands of comedy and tragedy.

It was the week of the great storm that destroyed half the trees in London. The week of the tremendous stockmarket crash.

I was in Bordeaux, supposedly helping with the grape harvest at Chateau Méaume, near Pomerol. The truth was that the 4 of us who went over from England were there as part of an annual PR jaunt; we sold the wine in London, and the owner of the property was a big pal of the chaps we worked for. Pissing in each other's pockets, as they say. We didn't do much work during our fortnight. Getting drunk seemed like a better idea. Each morning a case of wine was left on the doorstep of the cottage we slept in, and whoever delivered the 12 bottles removed the 12 empties from the previous day.

One day we went for a glorious autumnal drive through the Medoc. For a grapehead like I then was, this was one of my life's more exciting days. You just cannot imagine how happy I was that afternoon. I'd spent years studying these vineyards, these wines, these grapes. And here I was.

Chateau D'Yquem is the very greatest dessert wine on the planet. When we saw the sign, we stopped the car and got out. I just walked down to the end of the vineyard, where I found a big oak tree. How wonderful to sit beneath it on that late autumn afternoon, in the cool, dappled sunshine. Alongside me was a small river. I munched a few grapes, smoked a joint, and told myself that no one on earth was ever happier than this.

When we moved down to Berkshire from Leeds in 2002, I was sorting out some stuff and came across an envelope, upon which was written "CHATEAU D'YQUEM, October 1987". Inside was an acorn.

I haven't yet planted that acorn. Or have I? This is the first time I've asked myself the question. Perhaps it was a virtual acorn, and perhaps I've been sheltering beneath that virtual oak, grinning, ever since.

But wait. Chateau Palmer.

In the early 80s, I went to a Palmer tasting in London. We "looked at" (to use the archaic wine trade terminology) 3 or 4 recent off-vintages of Chateau Palmer. Despite being supposed lesser years, the wines were just beautiful; truly among the greatest clarets I have ever tasted. Apart from the fantastic Penfold's Grange Hermitage tasting I attended in 1986, the Palmer evening was simply the best ever. From that moment on, I was a Palmer man.

And so.

Palmer

And so, when our host at Chateau Méaume happened to mention, on the morning of our trip up the Medoc, that he was a buddy of the owner of Palmer, you can understand the electricity of excitement. I was throbbing. "Would there be any chance of arranging a visit ....?"

Alan spent the morning trying to phone the proprietor of Palmer, but to no avail. He wasn't around that day. These were pre-mobile days, of course. Another time perhaps.

A couple of hours later, we were driving slowly through Margaux, and there was Chateau Palmer. We had to stop. We parked on the road and wandered through the open gates. Such a shame that there was no one in to see us. My workmates stretched out on the lawn in the sunshine, while I went for a wander round the outside of the chateau. I walked around the hedge visible on the right of the picture, alongside the annexed part of the house.

The rooms along the right were mainly offices, and pretty dull. Desks, a few typewriters. I was disappointed. This was the world-famous Chateau Palmer. For all I could see, it might just as well have been the home of a ball-bearing lubricant magnate.

But then I came across the very final window, through which I could see a darkened room with a low ceiling and a line of chunky wooden tables. On the tables were unlit candles and loosely covered plates of dry biscuits. But much more exciting was a row of bottles with that distinctive, black and gold label. Six of them. I couldn't see the vintages, but they were pukka Palmer. My face was pressed against the window, and the window was steaming up. The Palmer tasting room.

It was a moment of revelation. It reminded me of a day 21 years earlier. 11 July 1966. Eight years old. Wandering the few hundred yards over to Wembley Stadium after school one day. England v Uruguay, the first match of the World Cup. I didn't have a ticket of course, but I stood outside the stadium listening to the clamour of the crowd inside. That moment has never gone away. The immense roar of 100,00 people on the other side of that wall, enjoying something that I couldn't see. That sense of missing out on something available to others kept returning. So near, yet so far. I didn't rationalise it until the day of the Palmer visit.

The story has a terrible twist. When we returned to Méaume, I mentioned that we'd had a wander round Palmer. Alan was aghast. "But you should have knocked on the door", he said. "I finally managed to get through after you'd left. They said they would love to meet you. They would set up a special tasting for you....."

Oh God. The tasting room; the bottles. They were for us, but we didn't know.

I think that afternoon destroyed forever the belief that I wasn't allowed to have the things that other people have. If I'd been a little bolder, I could have had a personal tutored tasting with the winemaker at Chateau Palmer.

So there I was, at Cliveden, peering through the window at the Palmer bottle, remembering looking through another significant window.

A less profound experience came yesterday at Eltham Palace in SE London. Eltham is a very curious minestrone of English social history. Been around since about the 10th century, and from 1250 or so was the leading royal palace right through the reigns of the Edwards, and nearly all the Henrys up to Henry VIII and a bit beyond. Around 1650 it fell out of favour, and almost unbelievably, the magnificent Great Hall with its vaulted ceilings and glorious stained glass windows became... became a cow barn for about 3 centuries or so. After several attempts at pulling the place down, the late Victorians suddenly woke up to its historical value, and leased it to the Courtauld family, who eventually built a sizeable house next door and turned the rooms into a series of stunning Art Deco set-pieces.

[Voice from the back]Hang on mate, what about the running? I've come here to read about the running, not all this crap about Art Deco set-pieces. When's the running stuff coming along, eh?

Ah yes, the running. Right. Coming right up Sir, coming right up.....

Saturday 24 September 2005

Three runs in three successive days. Crikey. Here I am, gulping lungfuls of air. This could be it, boys. Perhaps I've finally broken through the ice.

On Thursday morning I got up early and checked my mail. Ah, a message from Graham in Australia, or Mid Life Crisis Man, as forum-users will know him. I shouldn't betray confidences, but equally, I shouldn't fail to acknowledge what a decent geezer this man is. His post-Ashes desolation was as authentic as our glee, and I felt almost guilty when he mailed me his despairing surrender towards the end of Kevin Pietersen's Ashes-winning innings on the final day of the final Test.

The recent mail offered plenty of encouraging hints that things may be looking up: My local deli owner introduced me to Zerutti salted baby capers, which with smoked salmon and a perfect avocado on some lightly toasted Turkish pide bread is a simple treat of unusual altitude. And my attempts at brewing beer at home have been fantastically successful.

He went on to make some observations and list a few snippets of news. It wasn't one thing in particular, but the accumulation that was so affecting, and like most good writing, it added up to more than the sum of its parts. If I'd been drunk it might have left me with moistened eyes. But this was 6:30 in the morning, and I did something much more useful. I put on my running gear and went for my staple round-the-block 3½-miler. Yesterday evening I did the same. And again this morning. Running had been on the agenda for a couple of weeks, but each time I reached for the button, I found it greyed-out. Until that morning. Graham's mail somehow enabled it again, and I thank him for that.

I spent most of this morning's breathy plod thinking about the first mile. Or should that be The First Mile? It does seem to take on that significance sometimes. Every first mile is pretty awful, and I'm glad that it is. Running is so good that it has to have a price. Why should we get it for nothing? Those in the know realise it's a trifling fee, and pay it gladly. It's non-runners who make a sow's ear from the offer of a silk purse. We know that once the First Mile is buried, we can settle down and enjoy ourselves.

I was thinking about my own running career, and where it had brought me. I looked up some stats the other night. Taking the first run of the 2002 London Marathon campaign as my starting point, I've been running for 1384 days. Of that 1384-day span, I've actually run only on 470 days (34%). 914 (66%) have been inert. In that time I've run a total of 2512 miles, making an average of 5.34 miles per run.

Take my word for it, I typed out those figures with a faintly ironic smile. My belief holds, or has until now, that Motivation is the god of running. It's the spark that starts the fire and the fuel that keeps it burning. For many of us, maintaining our enthusiasm for running really is like trying to keep a campfire burning on a windy night. This constant struggle against ourselves and our self-esteem is part of the game, and the way we approach it becomes part of the journey of self-discovery. I wrote that here a year ago. August 2004

I reread it recently. It was déjà vu all over again. I still believe that motivation is the key-stone of it all, but I'm beginning to ask whether my tired old motivation strategy is worth a light. Stats. I'm beginning to re-evaluate them. My creed has always commanded runners to keep detailed records, and use them to build targets, and to use those targets for motivation. But they work both ways. They can be the rope you cling to as you inch towards the light, but they can be the rope that hangs you too. How lovely the spreadsheet looks when things are going well, but when they are not, how damaging to see your failure so vividly, so incontestably logged.

For 976 days - almost 3 years - between December 2002 and August 2005, I weighed myself every day and recorded the figure in my spreadsheet. The reason? Why, motivation of course. For this entire period I've been telling whoever would listen that keeping a note of your weight is enormously helpful. And yes, when I look through the figures, when I run my eye along the graphs that spring from these figures, I can see the numbers fall as I enter another wind-myself-up-and-go phase. Ah, er, but then I see the upward trend again as the motivation fades.

The figures speak for themselves. On Day 1 of the 976, Saturday December 7th 2002, I weighed in at 218 pounds. A month ago, on August 21st 2005, I was... 218 pounds. Yes, that is how motivating my spreadsheet has been.

"In mitigation, m'lud, my client had just returned from a trip to the United States where unfortunately, he succumbed to the, erm, the temptation of the hamburger and uh, something known as the... the French Fry...."

Yes, the States trip was a nutritional man-trap that I failed to side-step, and I managed to put on 8 pounds in a week, but that is no excuse. My weight graph has the same profile as the Beachy Head Marathon. Swoops and climbs, swoops and climbs....

It doesn't work, does it?

Let's be clear about this, motivation is indeed the grand lubricant in anyone's running - even for a plump, panting, middle-aged bloke like me. Particularly for someone like me, actually. But the log isn't all I've cracked it up to be. I've been trying to use it to stay afloat, but it keeps spinning round and dumping me in the river. Let the denial cease.

What am I saying here? That I won't keep my spreadsheet anymore? No, not that. I don't see any harm in having a record of when I've run and how far. But as from today, it's not a tool. It's no longer a weapon for beating myself with. It's a decoration; a passive reference. The wider implication (yes, pun intended) is that I have to get less obsessive about weight. It's still true that running is easier and more enjoyable if you're not 30 pounds overweight, and that will be addressed, but I'll weigh myself just occasionally from now on, and I won't bother writing it down. I can carry on pondering, but in the interests of taking the anal out of analysis, the weight spreadsheet has been defenestrated.

Running is good, that's all I need to know. Races are good too, but the trouble comes when the race becomes the end and the running becomes the means to that end. No more. From now on, the running is the end. The running is the self-contained objective. The race is an enjoyable diversion; socially interesting; an excuse to visit new places and make new friends; that's it. The race is no longer the light at the end of the tunnel. The race and the daily running are just two fingers on the same hand. No more will I beat myself up if I find that my schedule has scored more miles than me this week. Why should I feel bad about that? It's me who's been out and done the distances and felt the pain. What's the schedule done for me to feel so inferior?

Ah, but what happens when I decide to do a marathon? I need to tick off all those weekly checkboxes, don't I? What happens if I don't manage those three 20 mile runs? What happens if I run only three times this week instead of four? The honest answer is that I've no idea what will happen. I'll find out soon enough, I suspect.

I could write more here, but that's it for the moment. I think I may pop out for a beer and ponder this some more. But I feel good.

Guess what I'm beginning to think about the last 4 years? These first 4 years of running? Yes. That they have been The First Mile. The first mile, and I've come to the end of it at last.

Let the real fun begin.

Monday 26 September 2005

My sister's blog

Talk to the foot...

To comment on this, or anything else, please visit the Forum.

<<< last month | next month >>>