AII histopic entdy. as its cweated entipely on a haad-held jobbie. Its changed my lite. I caa now sit in the pub on a Sunday aften@@n aad watch the ftball have afew bevvies and write the stvpff for the site withut the iacareaieace of neediag a keyboapd aaa alt that caper. I caa jvst write oa the scpeea with oae of these stylus thiags aad thats it. Technolgy is Warvellovs isnt it.… …
Blog Posts
By the time I was 18, I’d fallen in love a hundred or so times. One of my victims was a racehorse called Wollow, and like most of my relationships, it was fun while it lasted, but at the end, I felt kinda let down. They later said that a piece of metal, a fastener, had twisted under her saddle. Twisted under her saddle, pierced her flank and distracted her. Someone more cynical said that her trainer had been bought off. Maybe she just wasn’t as good as I thought. But anyway, the long and the short of it is that she won me a stack of money through the unforgettable spring of 1976, the same spring that QPR were … …
“Avoid Huddersfield at all costs. I can’t exaggerate how awful it is there at the moment”. No, this advice comes not from me or some other hotel victim, but from the chap who does the traffic on Radio Leeds. His warning, earlier this evening, was referring to the flooding that has closed off half the town. Fortunately I heard the tip before I set off from Leeds, and was able to exploit my local knowledge to good effect. But I did ponder the words as I drove back, and have decided I need to get back to Leeds next week. Nostalgia is all very well, but it’s gone a bit too far this time. Another brief clatter round the town … …
It wasn’t pretty, but it sort of happened. Woke at 6am and prevaricated for an hour before getting up and out onto the damp streets of Huddersfield. I switched hotel last week, but am now back at the George, no longer believing this to be such a sleaze-hole. Last week’s grim experience at the low end of town, with its throbbing discos and pissed-up, door-banging neighbours and three-in-the-morning fire alarms was instructive. The George may be frayed at the edges but I can normally get an undisturbed night’s sleep here. It’s actually quite a famous hotel, its name being whispered with reverence in rugby league circles all over the world, apparently. It was here, in 1895, at a rowdy meeting … …
Time for another false dawn, surely. It must be at least a week since the last time I made a declaration about a new regime that I knew I couldn’t keep. And at least a week since I had a decent run, too. This, yawn, will all change early tomorrow morning, mmmm yeah, when I’ll get out there in the sodden streets of Huddersfield to start off a new era, yeah right, of running and rude good health. Who writes this stuff? The weather has sucked the country of energy in the past few days. The weekend was sweltering and humid. This moved seamlessly into two days of torrential rain and flooding. Even the start of a new football season … …
And again, although this time I have more of an excuse. The "again" applies to various things. The end-of-the-week collapse, for instance, though a combination of the start of the football season with its social commitments, and the weekend visit of some friends from Lancashire, are cast iron get-outs. Aren’t they? Then there’s the small matter of yet another abortive long run. This one happened on Friday. I’d taken the day off and come home a day early, so decided to do the long weekend run on Friday morning. But energy deserted me again, and my 5 miles were stop-start. I was defeated by three things: the oppressive midday heat, the fatigue I still felt from Wednesday night’s repeated 8 … …
Sisyphus rides again. When it comes to health and wellbeing, I work a kind of shift system. 4 days on, 3 days off. Last Friday, after the previous evening’s life-affirming jog-climb in Wharfedale, the culmination of a week of good, interesting running and textbook nutrition, I was at the top of my game. Yes, I was knackered, but nice-knackered. Post-coital nice-knackered. Finished-digging-a-bed-and-planting-all-your-veg nice-knackered. End-of-a-race nice knackered. So keen and enthusiastic did I feel, that my eyes must have looked like headlamps, shining into every dark corner of my daily routine, illuminating every work problem, sweeping out every last shred of pessimism. All was alive and alert and crackling with healthy appetite. I’d lost 5 pounds in 4 days. I was … …
Nature hates an imbalance. After an abstemious week, it seemed only right to use the weekend to redress matters. At least I managed a sort of run first. 5.2 miles sounds good, but on such a sweltering day, my poor undernourished body really didn’t want to play the game, and who could blame it? While the rest of the village snoozed on their sun-loungers or watched the test match from a favourite armchair, I pointed my Hal Higdon baseball cap at the horizon and turned the ignition. I dribbled along for a mile or so, then walked in the shade for a while, then trotted some more. And so it went on. I did work up a sweat eventually, but … …
A busy evening of wholesome exercise with Luke, my old friend from Keighley. We met at Barden Bridge, a mile or two beyond Bolton Abbey near Skipton, North Yorkshire. This is Wharfedale, part of the Yorkshire Dales, and as landscapes go, tearfully close to heaven. We set off at 7:30 and walked steadily upwards for an hour or so, till we reached the craggy summit of Simon’s Seat. No postcard shop, no ice-cream hut, and best of all, no people. Less than two hours earlier I was inching through the clouds of choking diesel fumes in the centre of Leeds. Now we were two men perched on a rock at the top of the world. Just the wind in the … …
It seems like a long time since I lived in this town, and I’d taken it for granted that the people I hung round with then must have moved away or shrivelled into middle-age. But this morning I saw someone I recognised. I was standing outside the George Hotel in my Reading Half Marathon teeshirt and shorts, waiting for my watch to wake up and find a satellite, when he shambled past me. I couldn’t place him at first, but I knew the face. A guy in his thirties now, red-faced, eyes bloodshot, hair awry. He panted up the final slope to the station, shirt hanging out of his trousers, puffing on a cigarette. As he lunged past me, coughing, … …