von Bingen, roast chicken, and a bottle of grenache.
And still it rains.
It rains every day, sometimes drizzly and annoying, sometimes torrential and dreadful. One thing is for sure: we are all heartily fed up with it. Seven biblical weeks of rain and there's still no end in sight. If there's an ark being built somewhere near here, I'm on it. If I happen upon a man named Noah, I'm signing on as an intern labourer, I don't care; I just want out of this watery torpor.
Constant rain, like a prevailing Saharan sirocco windstorm, will drive man and beast mad with frustration, and this is what we face. Climate change or not, the effect of this weirdness is plain for all to see; with no-one immune it changes the behaviour of an entire city's populace, and the experts who dare to try and rationally define the cause are routinely slaughtered by a fed-up public, if not literally, then at least by character assassination on all forms of media, both on social platforms and the mainstream Murdochian monopoly.
The impact ripples outward into everything we do: work performance suffers; road rage is rife, and even our dreams take on a moistened hue. I dreamed the other night a dream within a dream; of hiring a dinghy for a day, and then the day after, having not returned it and with no means of transporting it back, I further dreamed that I had only dreamt the boat; or did I? After a restless night I was half way to the city on the 5:09 to work before I finally decided the dream of a dream was after all, but a dream, and that no angry boat owners were going to be calling me that day.
And after all that, my scheduled run in the rain was cut terribly short. One hour of soaked and unhappy painful plodding was all I could muster - the entry in my log being my first sub-double digit kilometre run since the Almeria post-race recovery jog through the old part of town seven weeks before. And it hurt, both mentally and in the physical realm; of that I did not dream.
And still here the rain comes down.
Tonight I took out my frustrations on a chook: blinded by exhaustion and wet within wet, I went overboard, to use an appropriately nautical expression, and gave the poor bird that was to be roasted a taxidermist's attention to detail. Carefully separating the skin from the bird, I layered it with buttered garlic and then stuffed it to the gills - if chickens can have gills, and in this weather, I believe they can - with exquisitely caramelised onion and sage. Perfectly roasted (admittedly more by luck than culinary skill) it was consumed with gusto and a bottle of decade-old and beautifully cellared grenache, whilst the 12th-century mystic, polymath and composer Hildegard von Bingen's O Jerusalem Aurea Civitas played on the radio; the 20-minute piece perfectly matching the mood of the gourmands and the time required to consume the meal.
The sanity-restoring combo of mystics, poultry and aged red wine worked its magic, and soon I was back to Earth again. The rain stopped; the sawing of timbers for the planking of the ark ceased and life returned to normal at least for a moment.
But what of tomorrow? Like a paranoid conspiracist, I survey my training schedule and realise I can't do the 25km I have inked in for tomorrow. Or can I? A good night's sleep is all it takes, and of that, I am fairly well-assured. Following a week of early starts I am now on the night shift again, and sleeping in is de rigeur. I shall dutifully attend to the task at hand. But I am tired. Not just tired by work, but physically and mentally shattered by the rain, the park and other things ... no, wait, that's a Cowsills song from the 60s*.
Nostalgia aside, the tiredness remains. But then, I remind myself once more that this is like the end of any long running race: unable to go on, somehow we do, and tomorrow I must. And I shall.
Even if by chance it goes badly, I will have a nice roast chicken meal and a decent grenache to remember it by. And Hildegard von Bingen, bless her, from nearly a millennium ago.
*Their big hit from 1967, in fact. The Cowsills were the inspiration for the 1970s TV show The Patridge Family.
March Too Much
