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. … …
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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 … …
The years are ganging up on me. One of those significant birthdays pops up this year, so I should attempt a last hurrah; a final bout against Old Father Time and his wingèd chariot. The idea of aiming for another marathon toyed with me, probably based on the adage that there’s no fool like an old fool — particularly where I’m involved. But last time I tried that, Berlin 2013, I ended up in a Zurich hospital, writhing on a padded table like a trapped snake, as an exasperated doctor and nurse tried to restrain me long enough to inject steroids into a couple of collapsed vertebrae. … …
Today, 30 July 2016, is the 50th anniversary of England’s finest football moment. I was born in 1957, and until I found the trapdoor to adulthood, and escaped to university in the late seventies, lived in a dull London suburb called Wembley. London’s under-10s were too young to appreciate the Swinging Sixties, but we didn’t mind. We had more pressing concerns, like scrambling round crumbling bomb sites and being chased down empty streets by aggrieved, fist-waving adults barking dark threats to take us “down the station.” My personal list of approved recreational options included perhaps the greatest playground of all – Wembley Stadium. The old place stood right across the road from my primary school, St Joseph’s. Those famous twin … …
Someone I admired early in my plodding career was Julie Welch, whose resignedly matter-of-fact tale of the London Marathon, 26.2, I found strangely inspiring. Her piece on the Serpies website still brings a distant sheen to the old eyeballs, ten years after I last read it. The lachrymosity is part nostalgia, part melancholy, part euphoria, and part Chianti. Her post-running life has been somewhat pedestrian: she became a long distance walker. Some ex-runners crank up the heart rate with cycling, or slope off to the piste. Others, unable to cope with the indignity of retirement, retreat to the potting shed with a half bottle of vodka concealed inside their Daily Express. Me? As mentioned in my last, … …