My neighbourhood WhatsApp group announced today a local weekly session of gentle stretching and movement for ‘older residents’. When I realised they were including me in that decaying demographic, I knew it was time to act. With a sense of outrage and defiance, I would seize the exercise nettle myself. The resulting experience, a sort of run along Eastbourne seafront, was joyous. This coastal venture wasn’t as spontaneous as I’m pretending. The notion of trying to re-enter the plodosphere, more than 11 years after the 2013 Berlin Marathon, my last serious athletic endeavour [it was the event that was serious, not so much my six-hour effort], has been brewing for a long time. Years. But it’s only in the past … …
Author: andy
Having nothing worthwhile to write about is a good reason to keep away from the page, though it’s a rule of thumb ignored by many, including most newspaper columnists. Another reason for writing paralysis, and the one that applies to me, is the opposite — a mumble mountain so high that any attempted expedition seems doomed to end in failure. It’s like staring at that forest of six-foot weeds on the allotment you’ve been allocated after years on the waiting list. You know that if you start digging it over at one end, by the time you reach the far boundary, your initial efforts will have vanished beneath another carpet of weeds. There was a heap of Swiss compost to … …
Two diverting walks to report. I’m afraid I got so bored with this entry that I’ll leave the second to next time. Here’s the first. 1. Sunday 14 March, Wagitalersee: Ah! Nothing better than a bracing walk in a blizzard to blow a few cobwebs from the fat bloke emerging from winter hibernation — even if a statement as glibly positive as this will be heard only after the trauma is over, and the memory rapidly diminishing in the rear-view mirror. My German friend, C, messaged me far too early for a Sunday — a common character defect among the wholesome Teutonic peoples. I blame myself for forgetting to turn off the phone. Otherwise, I’d have slept on obliviously, no … …
What’s another word for thesaurus? I was carefully considering this important matter the other day when it struck me that one problem with this pre-retirement period is that I’m running out of things to worry about. It’s starting to concern me, and the fact that my increasing lack of anxiety is becoming quite stressful is itself a cause for mounting unease. Part of the problem is that I’m trying not to waste too much time on traditional sources of angst — news and current affairs. The unique permutation of prejudices and preferences we must each shoulder ensures that no consensus can exist on what the news actually is or should be, rendering most of it pretty pointless and unnecessarily provocative. … …
Travel doesn’t just broaden the mind, it puts a bomb under everything you’ve ever known and detonates it in slow motion. The above headline should have been more startling than it was when I spotted it recently on www.swissinfo.ch. It’s all about the the burning of the Böögg, naturally: the climax to the annual spring parade in Zürich. The poor chap is stuffed with fireworks and set on fire in a ritual that’s watched with keen interest because the shorter the time taken for his head to explode, the longer and hotter the summer will be. The question is what can we do with that summer? Switzerland is famously, or notoriously, thought of as a highly efficient sort of … …
As someone whose earlier athletic history would have made an arthritic sloth look like Usain Bolt, my midlife running career was an autobiographical plot twist to make even Jed Mercurio blush. So the idea of trying to revive this dead horse, seven years after it gratefully sank into the darkness beneath the coffin lid of the 2013 Berlin Marathon, is hard to explain. Yet here I am near the end of week 2 of the C25K programme, a veteran of seven mild jaunts. Alive. As week 1 finished, some weird part of me was even looking forward to week 2, but my shameful confession is that increasing the initial 60-second run by 50 percent this week has been challenging, despite … …
This week’s Mars landing revived memories of that most famous faux pas of them all, and acted as a suitable backdrop for another tectonic event — the official start of my campaign to complete a 5K run without intervention from the Grim Reaper. As any social media captive or desolate blogger will know, we’re all located at the centre of our own universes, and so, folded within this afternoon’s modest exertions, I spared a few sympathetic seconds to Neil Armstrong. I suppose one consolation is that if you’re going to mess up your lines so spectacularly, best that you do it as far away as possible. The moon for instance. At least no one’s likely to notice there. The interplanetary … …
So why is running the answer? And what’s it the answer to? Had I ever really asked myself these questions before? Maybe I’ve kept away from them, unsure of what the answers might be. Which reflects the barrister’s golden rule of cross-examination: never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer. But anyway, today I did ask myself those questions. How civilised it felt to go for a weekday plod in February in the daylight. Traditionally, such outings take place in the cold and in darkness, either before seven-thirty in the morning or after seven-thirty in the evening. But remember, I’m now the retiring type. So bollocks to all those corporate Babylons. I’ve won my freedom. I … …
Mentioning the initial success of my weight-loss campaign was always going to be a hostage to fortune. Perhaps predictably, the wobbly downward line on the graph immediately turned horizontal, and even rose a bit, as soon as I’d issued my self-congratulatory remark on how well I was doing. But this is meat and drink, albeit lean and sugar-free, for a health-campaign veteran like me. The infamous plateau. You spend five days under-eating and over-exerting, only to find that you’re heavier at the end of it than when you started. But the same veteran also knows that this is part of the mystery, and that if you keep going, some sort of visible progress will reassert itself. Of course, the fact … …
Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It is — crikey — nearly four years since my last confession. We’ve some catching up to do. Life, eh? Well why wouldn’t things have changed in four years? The Trump tornado has blown through and vanished, at least for the moment, leaving us scratching our heads and staring at the wreckage. Worse is that if, as seems likely, he’ll escape a guilty verdict in his impeachment (currently playing out in the Senate) then he’ll be back in some form. Anyone who thinks he’ll shrug off his humiliation and head for the golf course to enjoy his sunset years is mistaken. And bang goes my first memo-to-self: not to talk about politics. Maybe … …