The story of the day has to be the one about the traffic warden who gave a parking ticket to a bus in Manchester, as it stopped to pick up passengers at a bus-stop. His employers rescinded the ticket, commenting that he “had shown a lack of judgement, and would undergo appropriate retraining”.
I’m sure that M has hidden my hats. I used to have an impressive collection of baseball caps, woolly hats, and a Panama, and none of them can be found. Their sudden disappearance is suspicious, and my investigation has implicated her. Why? Mainly, her unease about my tendency to strut around the house with one of these objects balanced on my head. You’re too old to behave like this, she says. But self-evidently I’m not, I argue.
My interest in hats began when I was a student. I shared a house with a couple of other guys and three hats: a topper, a bowler, and a trilby. In fact there was one top hat, two bowlers and three trilbies. We swapped these items round, depending on whether our mood was funereal, industrious or flippant respectively. Having only one topper meant that only one of us could be depressed at any given moment. Two bowlers was a mechanism for limiting businesslike behaviour to a maximum of two at a time. (A bit like a nuclear attack, this was only ever a theoretical possibility but had to be guarded against. I don’t recall any time when two of us were doing anything constructive simultaneously. Indeed, I’d be hard pressed to remember any time when even one of us was usefully occupied.) The three trilbies were for those rest and recreation occasions when we could, at last, put our feet up and relax in front of the TV. The trilbies were very well used, and on most days were worn from the moment we rose for breakfast in the early afternoon right through to 5 or 6am, when it was time to bring another stressful day to an end.
I was thinking of this today as I searched for appropriate headgear for my late afternoon run. The rain was coming down in buckets, and the sky was darkening. Ideal conditions for my white Chicago baseball cap. But it was nowhere to be found, and eventually I had to go without it.
Sometimes rain is a hazard and an inconvenience. At other times it’s a liberation, and reminds you that running is a special activity; one that seems to protect you from normal worldy discomfort. Today was like that. As I locked the backdoor behind me, I could feel the rain bouncing off the sloping roof and splattering down my back and neck. It didn’t matter.
One of my favourite sayings comes from Eleanor Roosevelt: No one can make you unhappy without your permission.
I thought of it last night when my sister was talking about quotations. She had chosen one to put in her ezine. It’s by Tommy Cooper, and it goes:
Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world is Chinese. There are 5 people in my family, so one of them must be Chinese. It’s either my mum or my dad. Or my older brother Colin. Or my younger brother Ho-Cha-Chu. I think it’s Colin.
Back to Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s one of those pithy sayings that I do think has actually changed my life in some way. It’s much harder to be unhappy, knowing that you can only be so if you decide to be so. I suppose there’s a category of terrible circumstances that are always going to cause despair, however strong-willed you are, but leave those aside for the moment.
Let’s talk about the relatively tivial things in life. Like going for a run in the rain. It really doesn’t matter if it’s raining, does it? People think that the perfect clothing for rainy weather includes an overcoat and hat and galoshes and umbrella. No. Ideal clothing for a rainy day is skimpy T-shirt and shorts. There’s less to get wet. You’re going to have a shower when you get home anyway, so what’s the problem with getting a bit damp now? Or even very damp?
It was only a three miler, and the idea was just to loosen up a bit before Sunday. It took me round some of the unknown paths I’d spotted on my new OS map. This is where having a speed and distance monitor comes into its own. I decided I was going to go for three miles, and was able to run where I wanted. It didn’t matter that a couple of times I came up against a dead end, or a path that I just lost interest in. The SDM kept clocking up the distance, and at 3 miles I stopped and trotted back along the puddled pavement.
I know what you’re thinking. If a T-shirt and shorts are all that’s needed for a rainy run, why was I looking for a hat? The answer is that I usually wear glasses on training runs, and rain can be a hazard. A hat with a brim reduces the need to keep wiping the rain off them.
But anyway, no hat was available, and M is still pleading ignorance about their mass defection. I think she’s shown a lack of judgement, and may have to undergo appropriate retraining.
