Wednesday 1 November 2006

At 6:30 this morning, I opened my eyes and thought: "Thy will be done".

My first pre-breakfast UK run since the early spring.

I don't suppose I ever really enjoyed an early morning run but I tell myself that I did. There is pleasure, but it's deferred. It's the getting back home, like a carthorse after a day's work, breath steaming through your nostrils. The sudden roasting from the central heating as you come in from the cold. All that clinging, dripping and gulping in the kitchen. The pleasure is not in the running, but in the release from the pain of running.

I wasn't looking forward to this one. As I set off, I wondered how many of these stop-start sessions I'd have to file away before I could get back to proper running. Or my version of proper running, which might not be the same as yours.

It's getting cold out there now, though changing the clocks at the weekend at least gave me some daylight. I began my forlorn totter, marvelling at the memory of three full winters of running with no jacket. Last year was the first time I started wearing one regularly. Before that, it somehow never quite occurred to me that I needed anything but short-sleeved teeshirt and shorts, even in sub-zero temperatures. Running is a hairshirt activity, I reasoned. I shouldn't be seeking solace and mitigation, or I might as well have stayed at home.

November 1st. After the summer that never ended, suddenly we're at the cliff edge of winter. What happened to autumn?

We're not quite sub-zero yet. In fact it was a great morning to be out there.

The first of the month is always a good day for a run. An excellent opportunity for self-deception. It always feels like a fresh start, even if you're doing nothing different.

But today was different. Not just that it was my first early morning outing for a long time. I was certain that it would be another stop-start like Monday evening. Too plump and unfit at the moment to avoid walking for at least half the 3.5 miles.

But a weird thing happened. As usual, I started my run with all the velocity of a brick being launched from a child's catapult. After plodding a hundred metres or so, I waited for that lung-busting sensation to kick in, forcing me to a panting halt.

But it never came. I carried on, and on, and on. It wasn't a fast session of course (somewhere over 11:30 minutes a mile), but apart from an enforced 30 second stop when I had to cross a busy road, I managed to keep going the entire way. Very odd. I'd assumed that my 5 week lay-off had put me right back to where I had been before my brief revival in September, but I may be a bit further along the track than I thought.

A couple of thoughts. One is that I did too much too soon last time. Looking back at my running log, I ran 6 days out of 7 before that Saturday morning when I pulled up, followed a day or so later by the worrying calf pains that spooked me. Even at my modest level, it's possible to overtrain, and I think that's part of where I went wrong. Just for the moment this can be an alternate-days activity.

I've also abandoned running with music for a while. My iPod habit started in the run-up to Zurich, when I decided I needed a mental diversion on my long runs. It then became a fixture, even on the short ones. But I'm heading back the other way again now. It puts too much distance between me and the activity -- which of course was the idea. But perhaps you should never try to take your mind off it completely. Perhaps you need that awareness of running. Perhaps that's the actual point. Much as I love Jimi Hendrix, he was getting in the way. Fine for the gym, and perhaps very long runs, but not for 4 or 5 miles in the English countryside.

A decent start to the revival then. I'm still uncertain about the possibility of doing the 56-kilometre ultra in South Africa in April. It's one step at a time. The Brighton 10K in a couple of weeks is an important hurdle. Just 6 miles perhaps, but in confidence value, it's worth more than that. Then a couple of wintry favourites -- the hilly Cliveden Cross Country on New Year's Eve, then a return to Almeria at the end of January for the half marathon. (Read about it here.)

That's only 8 or 9 weeks from the ultra, so I'll have a better idea by then what my chances are. Last year, Almeria marked the end of a very good running spell. The beer and the R 'n' R was itself fine, but it punched a hole in my resolve that took a while to repair. There's no chance of not enjoying a few drinks next time either, but I need to make sure that I get back to work straight away.

Perhaps a line from the Lard's Prayer should be:

Do lead us into temptation
But not too far, please

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Friday 3 November 2006

Last weekend I was 232 pounds, or, for those who prefer to measure humiliation in metric, 104.5 kilos . That is one egregious lard mountain. Checking my running stats later, I found that this was heavier than any time in the last 5 years. The fattest I've been since records began, you could say.

Wow. I was so shocked, I nearly got out of my armchair. Mercifully, I managed to settle back before I found myself doing something irrational, like cancelling my visit to the pub.

History shows that a day or two later I did indeed shift my prodigious arse and go a'plodding, but so far it's had little impact on my impressive bulk. My weighing scales seem to have fallen foul of the 229 bug. On Monday I was 230 pounds. Tuesday 229. Wednesday 229. Thursday 229. Friday 229.

What's going on? I've had a week of healthy eating, three decent runs, and twice-daily walks. No alcohol or ghastly sweet stuff. I've been a paragon of nutritional rectitude and incorruptibility, but those scales just aren't playing ball.

The most I've ever known myself to weigh was 243 pounds, or 17.5 stone. That was Christmas 2000, and I was so horrified that I went out a few days later and bought an exercise bike. It didn't get me anywhere.

OK, so it did really. I started to shed weight quite quickly but a couple of months later, I reached a plateau, and it was then that I toyed with the idea of 'jogging'. And you know what happened next. Yep, not a lot. I spent the next 8 months trying to run 3 miles without stopping, finally succeeding in November 2001, just days before hearing that I'd got a place in the London Marathon the following April.

Laugh or cry?

2002, the year of two marathons, had my weight going up and down like the proverbial tart's knickers. Just before Chicago in October, I finally dipped below 200 pounds. But I found that while I could lose it pretty quickly, I could put it on even faster. And I've been at war with myself ever since.

For most of my adult life I hovered around the 180/182 pound mark. I was never thin, but in retrospect, I was always a reasonable weight. And then? And then I stopped smoking, and shot up about 3 stone without really noticing. I'd moved house around that time, and presumed that the Huddersfield microclimate had made all my clothes shrink. When I eventually had to replace my jeans, instead of being a 32 inch waist, I'd somehow become 38. It was only then that the terrible truth hit home......

Just recently, I've wondered whether I could get down to that sort of mark again. 182 pounds. It would be tough. Losing weight seems to get harder as you age, and 50 pounds is a LOT to lose. But I'll have a go. And I'm mentioning it here for the same reason that I started RunningCommentary in the first place. I reasoned that the more public I made my intention to run London, the harder it would be to climb down.

So there we are. My target for the Two Oceans Marathon in April 2007 is 182 pounds. It means shedding just over 2 pounds a week between now and the start of April. This is actually quite do-able if you know about weight loss. It's the amount that's regarded as "sensible" by most nutritionists -- not that I have ever aspired to good sense.

If I could get anywhere near that mark, my chances of getting round the TOM would be hugely increased. Right now, the thought of doing the race is plain hilarious.

I was out this morning at 7 o'clock, as the temperature dropped below zero for the first time. My sprouts were frozen.

I noticed this as I crunched past past my vegetable bed at the end of the garden. It's important news. I keep reading that brussels are at their best once the first frost has got to them. I'll test the theory this weekend. It could be an explosive experiment.

But what a morning. What a morning to be a runner. While the rest of the world looked glum and frightened, I bet that runners across the nation were as spellbound as I was. For us, it was Christmas come early. We defeat the cold not by wearing more clothes but by wearing fewer. We show defiance. We celebrate it. We don't stay away from it; we plunge into its heart.

I heard yesterday that half a million Brits had emigrated last year. The radio phone-ins were throbbing with whingers. How awful Britain has become. How they envied people who could pack their bags and leave for Spain or Australia. How they hated this country.

I thought about this as I trotted along the frosty footpath into the trees, marvelling at my very own New World. Being a runner allows you to emigrate any time you want to, safe in the knowledge that you'll be back home within the hour. I thought about those wretched people who never discover this. I know that many of those who complain about their lives have never truly lived them. And I'd say with certainly, they've never scampered through a frozen English wood in early November, in that first golden hour after sunrise.

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Tuesday 7 November 2006

Some people like to run with their dogs. An interesting way of staying motivated. I'm thinking about buying a tortoise to tag along with. Help coax me out of my comfort zone.

Progress is slow, but there is progress. I was out again at 7 this morning, turning in around 4 miles. Again, no walking. I seem to have emerged from that phase. It's horribly slow; still well over 11 minutes a mile. More like 11:30, in fact. But it's 4 miles without a break, and that's a good sign that I'm slowly starting to build up some endurance again.

At the moment I'm sticking to the party line -- I'm doing the Two Oceans 35 miler,, and plan get round within the 7 hour cut-off. But somewhere at the back of my mind is the teasing knowledge that there is a Two Oceans half marathon as well. I'm not yet thinking about it as a strong possibility but I'm glad it's there as a fall-back. I'll carry on as I am, but at some point before the end of the year I have to rediscover reasonably comfortable double-digit long runs, or it will be time to sit myself down and have that tough conversation.

I need a change of long run scenery. Did running up and down the canal ever have a sparkle? I think it must have done, but it fell off on some marathon campaign somewhere. I plodded along it again for a few miles on Sunday, thinking that life must have more to offer than this. Glittering in the wintry sun, the canal was as lovely to look as ever, but the soft uneven path saps my physical strength, and the out-and-back nature of the run drains my enthusiasm. To run somewhere, then turn round and run back the way you came, seems to encapsulate the essential futility of the human condition. It becomes a simplified model of Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man. And I know precisely what I mean by that, so just back off.

Looks like I'll need to drive somewhere to run long. Getting into the car to go for a run goes against the grain, but it's time to rediscover the cold thrill of going long, and the excitement of exploring a new route. When I was training for that first marathon, my weekdays were coloured by a febrile sense of fear and glee. The long run was the fulcrum of the week. I'd spend half the week being amazed at what I'd done the previous Sunday, and the second half panicking about pushing it another mile or two the following one. Let's have that again. Time to reinvent the LSD.

In a rash moment a few months ago I did suggest to Sweder of this parish that I'd go down to Brighton to join with one of his famous hillside lopes, but the more I read about those craggy monsters, the more frightening they sound. And that's just the runners, not the hills. Safer to stick to my lonely Berkshire dominion for the moment, I think, though I need to find some road less travelled.

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Saturday 11 November 2006

When I was at school, I noticed that had TS Eliot been called ST Eliot, his name spelt backwards would have been... well, work it out for yourself.

Thought about that this evening, as I re-read the start of The Waste Land. I hadn't looked at it for... gulp, nearly thirty years. Tonight, I finally realised what my English teacher was going on about all those years ago. When I was 16, I thought it was an OK poem, if a bit obtuse. It's actually a quite brilliant piece of writing, but I guess you have to be as old as I am now to realise that finally.

Why was I reading it?

Because I'd started this entry with the words: "November, surely, is the cruellest month", and I couldn't quite remember the literary reference. It turns out to be Eliot, whose poem begins:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

It was mid-afternoon before I got out. The sun was gone, but there were seven miles still to be run. Erk.

I first detoured to the war memorial in the village churchyard. We're a pretty big community now, but in Edwardian times, the village was small. Its raison d'etre was its position on the old Bath Road -- a staging post for travellers between London and Bristol. It's why there are so many pubs here. Two or three of them still have cobbled back yards and stables.

I recently spoke to Roy, the village historian. During the First World War, the population was "three or four hundred". The war memorial I visited in the churchyard this afternoon lists more than 30 Wilfreds, Herberts, Ernests, Henrys who were casualties of the war. So about one in ten of the village must have perished.

The sky was dense and battleship grey, a fitting backdrop to a run on Remembrance Day. Despite what I recently said about avoiding the canal for long runs, that's where I headed today. Seven miles isn't really a long run, even if it occupies that slot this week.

It was a good outing. Hopelessly slow, but I'm not worrying about that just yet. My current priorities are to build fitness and lose weight. This was primarily a fat-burning run, and it did its job. A seven mile jog, without any walk breaks, is good for my confidence, and amounts to another useful step on the long road back.

I'm beginning to think that running with an iPod doesn't work for me, even if I can't fully explain it. I've eschewed music for 5 out of the last 6 runs, and all have gone pretty well. The one exception, last Sunday, was fitful, and I never got going. I suppose it affects my concentration. Perhaps that does make sense. The appeal of iPod running is that it occupies your mind while you're doing what can be a pretty humdrum activity. And the act of "occupying your mind" must displace something else viz your focus on what you're doing. So I'm having to relearn the pleasure of a period in which arbitrary thoughts are allowed to rattle round my dream box. It's like unharnessing the working horses and letting them roam around in the field for a few hours.

It was a sombre run on a sombre day, but I got back to the cheering news that QPR had vanquished Luton at their wretched place. I was also just in time to catch the evening game on TV between Blackburn and Man Utd. Yes, after many years of resistance, I've finally relented, and invited the great satan into my home.

Sky TV.

I don't like Rupert Murdoch, and I hate the way that the Bosman/Sky cocktail has corrupted football and detached it from its traditions. It's produced a tiny, wealthy elite atop a huge, pauperised pyramid without any hope. But. But I've fallen into bad habits, like watching the big games in the pub on a Sunday afternoon, which doesn't do my running any good. So I've finally caved in, and joined the masses. I'll even be able to watch England's 5-0 Ashes drubbing as it happens. Or the first and last hour at least. The matches start at about midnight and finish around 8 in the morning. Australia must be a very weird country.

Next week, the Brighton 10K. I'll struggle to get round in less than 65 minutes, but at least it now looks likely that I'll make it to the finish line. It didn't seem possible just a couple of weeks ago.

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Thursday 16 November 2006

Two or three early morning runs and an Everest of fresh, raw fruit and vegetables, has left me vibrating with good health all week. I'd forgotten how invigorating this is. Work has been a pleasure. Yes, it's that serious.

Another 5 miles due tomorrow, then a 48 hour rest before the Brighton 10K on Sunday, my first race since Zurich in April. It will be slow and flappy, but I will at least get round.

My weekly mileage and distances are creeping upwards but I'm still too fat to run quickly, even though I weighed in this morning at 12 pounds less than I did about 2.5 weeks ago.

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Sunday 19 November 2006 - Brighton 10K

Brighton has a kink. I'll come to it.

Time break a minor tradition by actually writing about today's Brighton 10K. For reasons now lost in the Sussex mists, I've written up all thirty-odd races I've done apart from the two previous runnings of the Brighton 10K. Having ignored it the first time, it seemed almost customary to do so again. But it's so long since I did a race of any kind that I can't let the opportunity pass to prattle on about it for a bit.

I enjoyed the day, though the race itself was tough.

M and I arrived in Brighton at around 10, and after a mild 'domestic' about where to park, headed for the multi-storey behind the Metropole. The decision seemed to provide a reasonable compromise between the distances to the locations we had to make: the start of the race; the "good shops"; and Alfresco, our post-race eating place. The Metropole was equally inconvenient for everything, so we were happy with it. We were able to part on good terms, with M heading off to the famous Lanes at a pace far more impressive than anything I was likely to produce during the race, while I strolled towards the start, down on Madeira Drive.

Brighton's a grand town; a true one-off. Nowhere else on this perplexing island exists such a compelling combination of bleeding-edge chic and fusty tradition. You're just as likely to be humiliated by a wacky performance artist pretending to be a statue as you are by a cadaverous drug bum seeking baksheesh, or an indignant, fur-clad nonagenarian wielding a shooting stick and a placard about immigration. Frightening, but it's why we keep coming back.

I thought about this as I meandered down the sea front in the chilly mid-morning sunshine. Past the rebuilt Grand Hotel, scene of the most audacious attack on parliamentary democracy since 1605. Whenever I walk past this building, something in me wants to say: "Bad luck, Magee", but.... but as much as I despised Thatcher during the 80s, I have to suppress that voice. We do things better than that here.

I arrived at the race start, dumped my stuff in the baggage truck and wandered back towards the rear of the field. The distant familiarity of it all was both comforting and slightly perplexing. I'd run so little since early April. A lot seems to have happened since then: redundancy, illness, the World Cup, new job, blobs of bereavement, interesting experiences in Belfast, Western Ireland and Iceland... but here I was, back where the spring had begun, doing another race. It was like erecting a sign that only I could see: Business As Usual. It was a relief to re-acquaint myself with the chatter and the stink of linament. And with Nigel and Ash indeed, who eventually appeared just as I was thinking I might be the victim of a practical joke.

The reunion was brief; the race was about to start. As we crossed the line, an announcement about FatBoy Slim's participation gave Ash the opportunity to poke fun at my portliness, but I was too stoical to acknowledge the slight. I stared straight ahead, and began panting, as Ash and Nigel vanished into the distance.

Looked at from one view, the Brighton 10K is a futile experience. You chug along for half a mile, then turn round and chug back. Carry on along Madeira Drive, manoeuvring round pushchairs and streetwise mongrels.... and exasperated cyclists... until you get to the aforementioned kink at around 4K where you drop down to the seafront for a second round against the same opponents. The next excitement comes at 6.5K, Hove, where you suddenly go 180 degrees and chug all the way back.

My struggle began at the kink, first time round. It's been several months since I ran sub 10:30 miles but the first couple today were 10:18 and 10:24, and they were enough to make the rest of race drag. In the end I limped home in my slowest ever 10K time, but I wasn't too bothered by that. It was important to do another race, and just to get round reasonably comfortably.

The truth is, it wasn't reasonably comfortable at all, but I'm not going to get too anxious about that. The next 10 weeks, until the Almeria Half, is the critical test. I have to get a lot fitter, lose another 20 pounds, and aim to get a decent time in Spain. If I can do that, the Two Oceans is on. If I can't get round Almeria feeling pleased with myself, I may have to stop kidding myself about running 35 miles in April. But I'll have a go.

The apres-race was, as always, well worth doing the race for. I met up with the others in Alfresco, a civilised place for recalorification. M arrived at the same time as me. Sweder was already there, with his wife and delightful dancing queen daughter, Phoebe. It was particularly good to meet up with MarathonDan and family, and bad luck that a sore throat had kept him out of the race. His two kids provided the cabaret as the adults guzzled beer and chomped through good Italian food on plates the size of dustbin lids. off Just as we had given up on Nigel, he arrived, beaming triumphantly at a better than expected performance. Or so he claimed. Neither Ash or I spotted him during the race, so we suspect that while we were wrestling with the running monster, he was enjoying a stroll along the beach, or a pre-lunch aperitif in one of the fashionable bars in the town centre. Eventually, the truth will out.

We ate and drank and swapped... not quite war stories. A 10K is too trivial for that. Skirmish stories, perhaps. As runners do when they meet, we relived previous races and looked forward to those yet to come, particularly those in Almeria and South Africa. Sweder was dismissive of the flat urban 10K. It had robbed him of his weekend scrap with the hills. For him it was a step back, but for me it was a good day's work, a psychological stride forward, even if the performance was a personal worst.

The race mattered, but more important was the meal and the socialising. It reminds you want this stuff is really all about. It carried on for a while after leaving the restaurant, when I went for a couple of beers with Nigel to catch up on other stuff. All very enjoyable, but tomorrow the hard work must restart.

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Wednesday 22 November 2006

Something rather odd happened today. I was out at 7 this morning for my pre-work energiser. The standard short route -- 3.5 miles. Felt good all day, and even worked late. Arrived home, looking forward to my Marks & Spencer's Chicken & Bacon layer salad and an evening in front of the Champions League, but blow me, when I heard the product of the Wednesday evening bellringers' practice reverberating across the village, I found myself changing into my running kit and getting back out there for a testing 5.2 miles around the pitch-black, drizzley lanes.

I can't explain it. I'm not sure if it's happened before. But anyway, it's made me feel extremely holy, and that's nothing to do with the earlier, joyous tintinnabulation.

It also means I can watch the dregs of day one of the first Ashes test tomorrow morning without guilt. Whether I'll watch it with pleasure is a moot point. There was some astringent correspondence on the forum regarding my pessimism. Except I see it as realism rather than pessimism. Mercifully, I'm not a cricket nut, so I don't have any great emotional investment in the outcome of the series. If England manage a win I'll be really pleased of course, but if we lose, as seems likely, I doubt I'll feel any great pain. But I'll watch when I can, in the hope of glimpsing some drama.

That said, I fancy a draw in the first match, and at 9/2, a reasonable bet I think. I should have had more than a tenner on QPR to win in Cardiff last Friday, but anyway, it means I have £40 that doesn't really belong to me burning a hole in my pocket, so it's now piled up on a draw in the first. If I lose, that's the end of my Ashes betting career.

May the best team draw.

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Tuesday 28 November 2006

Any mind mappers out there? I've recently been reminded how much it helps to see things in pictures.

Charting has long been an interest; probably since those distant lectures on systems analysis on my MSc course. The enthusiasm continued during a brief and largely miserable career as an intelligence analyst with the police, when I spent my days drawing sprawling, complex charts showing links between criminals and organised crime, and mapping out the hierarchy of their gangs.

Mind mapping is similar, but rather more useful, showing ideas or other entities in a tree-like structure, emanating from a central point.

I came across some interesting and sophisticated mind mapping software last week which I've been playing with. If you want, try it for a few days. I've been mapping the structure of the book I've half written, an exercise which has taught me that the book doesn't really have any structure at all, which in turn explains, at least in part, why the unwritten half of this great work exists only in the form of an invisible vapour, wafting around my ears, instead of in the shape of words arranged on a page, in a book, on the bestseller shelf, in WH Smith, on every high street, in every nation in the English-speaking world....

Eight and half sodden miles on Sunday, and another 4 or so tonight.

When filed away in the great back catalogue of excursions, Sunday's won't have a star against its name, yet it was a success, and an important one to get done. It's the longest non-stop plod I've managed since a distressing glimpse at the calendar forced me back into the saddle a month or so ago.

A couple of weeks back I vowed to discover some new territory for long runs. Today I headed back down to the canal but breaking the usual habit, forced myself east. Looking at the atlas later, I noted that had I continued running in the same direction, I'd have ended up in Tokyo by way of Brussels, Warsaw, northern Kazakhstan and Ulan Bator. It offers more cultural variety than the westward journey, where you'd arrive in the Land of the Rising Sun only via Swindon and Quebec. I've always rather fancied visiting Japan, so it was a matter of some regret that I made the decision to turn off at Southcote gravel pit, heading northwards instead through the council estate to rejoin the Bath Road, where I could turn left, back towards the village.

Earlier, I'd stared through my office window at the inclement conditions: torrential rain and a breeze stiff enough to contort the massive laurel at the far end of the garden, wondering whether, or rather when, I should do the manly thing. It stopped at last, so I took my chance, though it all started up again within minutes of my exit. It was as if I'd fallen into some trap, but I didn't much mind.

My days as a notorious trencherman may be over the time being, but their legacy, my prodigious avoirdupois, lingers. I dwelt on this fact as I lumbered towards the canal in the rain, like some lost hippopotamus yearning for the quiet life. Away from the pointing fingers, the gasps of surprise, the derisory cackles of the crisp-munching youth, assembled outside the Co-op in a line, as if queuing to join the pilgrimage to adulthood.

I needed something to take my mind off the travail ahead, so took an iPod along for the trip. I was glad I did. It added a bit of colour to a monochrome day. I listened to some new Bob Fox stuff. You won't have heard of Bob Fox. He's an ex-miner from Northumbria who became a folk singer somewhere along the line. I've always had a soft spot for him since an evening I spent in the Grove in Leeds, back in around 1994.

It was midwinter, and the snow was deep. I was staying locally that night, and decided to walk to the Friday folk club at the pub. I'd never have made it by car. The ring road was blocked by frozen traffic and burnt-out clutches, and the roads around the Grove were impassable. It explains why there were only about four of us in the the pub. One of them, fortunately, was Bob Fox, who was due to perform that evening, and who'd travelled up the day before. It was soon clear that there'd be no folk club that night; even the organisers had been stranded elsewhere. So we sat around a corner table in front of the wood fire and drank beer and talked. After a few ales, a couple of guitars appeared. Rather embarrassingly I'm sure, I sang one or two of my adolescent compositions which Bob Fox was polite about. He sang a great song called Farewell Johnny Miner, a lament to the moribund coal industry. It was the first time I'd heard this, and it's remained one of my favourite folk songs to this day.

We talked about the Beatles. I'd recently heard some folkie somewhere sing Eight Days A Week, and it had opened my eyes to the possibility of making early Beatles pop songs into gentle accoustic folk ballads. I'd even learnt the chords and issued what I'm sure was a horrible version, though the beer helped to wipe away our embarrassment. But did it plant a seed in his mind, I wonder?

On Sunday morning, trudging through the waterlogged fields alongside the canal, heading towards Japan, I heard him sing From Me To You. An exquisite rendition. Just a couple of notes changed in the melody, and sung wistfully rather than belted out as a rock 'n' roll number, and it's a totally different experience.

I came to a gate with a heron sitting on it. It was unusual for this elegant creature to be so unphased by the approach of a humanoid but I guess the understandable dread at seeing something like me bearing down was marginally exceeded by the thrill of finding such a splendid vantage point overlooking the weir, where no doubt a variety of tasty fish would be exposed. Any moment now.

Any moment now.

Any moment.... bugger.

He couldn't wait any longer, and flapped off just as I began reaching for the bolt.

I also listened to the two new Rickie Gervais podcasts. I'm a fan. I lent my DVD of The Office to Paula, my hairdresser, assuming that she'd give me a free haircut, but she still charged me thirteen quid last time I was in. And hasn't returned my DVD, which she insolently described as "quite good" as she mowed great stripes into my head.

If you've not heard the Rickie Gervais podcasts, do yourself a favour. If you're reading this sometime in the 22nd Century, this is likely to have moved, so try here instead.

Word of the Day. Remember that idea? I once threatened to contrive to use Dictionary.com's Word of the Day in these diary entries. I gave up after a while. I could sense my sanity being eroded by the effort. But as I ran on Sunday, I was struck by how many words close to my heart had been chosen over the last few days:
trencherman: a hearty eater.
avoirdupois: weight; heaviness.
inclement: harsh; severe -- especially said of the weather.
travail: painful, arduous work;

I may have to revive the plan.

Returning through the far end of the village, I found myself in the middle of a small gypsy encampment. It hadn't been here the day before. A fellow in a bashed-up trilby was whistling loudly, and tunefully, as he used a yard-brush and a bucket of soapy water to scrub down a squealing black and white pony tethered to a lamp-post.

Different lives, different preoccupations. The hoodies by the Co-op; Bob Fox; the heron; Rickie Gervais; the gypsies; me. The wonder is not that we don't all co-exist in peace, but that we're not in a perpetual state of bloody conflict.

But it was 8½ chalked up, with 500 more to go.

LISTEN: From Me To You

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Wednesday 29 November 2006

Coming soon:

Why you should steer clear of Garmin.

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