It must be another sign of growing old (were more proof needed). For my birthday this year, I asked not for the new Led Zeppelin DVD, but… a breadmaker.
And I’ve been using this item regularly since June. In the way of most men, I spent a few hours fiddling with it, trying to persuade it to work, before, in a moment of desperation, deciding to read the instructions. Here I discovered that bread has all sorts of undesirable, invisible ingredients: sugar, salt, milk powder, vitamin C, butter… Surely all these items weren’t really necessary? I decided to leave out the sugar, salt and milk powder, and added a lump of margarine instead of the butter. I produced a few perfectly edible loaves with this method, but decided eventually that something wasn’t quite right. The consistency was a bit heavy. I decided to add half the amount of sugar recommended. Better. Next time I even included a pinch of salt, which brought about further improvement. Then I swapped the margarine for butter. And eventually I gave in and bought some milk powder to add to the mix. This was much more like it. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I went the whole hog, and actually made a loaf of bread with ALL the specified ingredients and in the recommended quantities. And the result? Wow! Perfection.
My bread-machine experience is a kind of metaphor for my running, I reckon. I’m told how to do something but I think, no, that doesn’t sound quite right. I’ll do it this way instead. Do I really need to wear shoes like that? How important are those technical T-shirts? Should I really join a running club? Surely it can’t be that bad an idea to run three half marathons in three weeks? What’s the point of keeping a log? Is it really necessary to stretch after a run? And so on.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, I’m beginning to realise, and not without a certain amount of alarm, that these rules and recommendations may actually have some legitimacy.
What brought this on? Two things in particular: one is the growing sense that I really should consider joining a running club, or at least have a go at running with a group. There is a small local running club who run for 5 miles on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and a very much larger club in Reading (the Reading Road Runners) who meet almost every day of the week. The latter have a huge membership and a heap of resources, but I’m drawn towards the intimacy of the smaller outfit. Another possibility is the Serpentine Runners, who run in Hyde Park, in central London, on Wednesday evenings. I’ve always liked the idea of joining the Serpies, and their website is the best in the business. There’s something appealing about the thought of finishing work, and popping along to Hyde Park for a four or a seven mile run (they offer both) with a large bunch of people. Motivation isn’t normally a great problem for me, but the burgeoning winter may regard that as a challenge. A running group can only help.
Dare I do it?
The second reason for bringing this up is the relearning of the alcohol lesson. I had only three very small pints of Guinness before last night’s match, but it was enough to ensure that the world that met me early this morning had a strangely remote feel to it. A sheet of very fine gauze separated me from reality, and my ears were half-filled with a quiet, distant hiss. It wasn’t even too unpleasant, but was just sufficient to stop me leaving my bed and running. I didn’t even feel bad about it.
The match left me feeling sad. This isn’t a common football emotion. After losing 3-0 at home (albeit to a team two divisions higher than us), I’d have expected to feel angry or frustrated. But the team played pretty well, and wanted so much to win. But they just weren’t good enough. I feel sorry for the players, I feel sorry for the club, and I feel sorry for the supporters – myself especially.
The football universe is in turmoil. It’s become a gaudy, sterile money monster, behaving badly because it knows its time is almost up. I’ve never liked Chelsea especially, but the club had self-respect once. Now it is reduced to the role of a prostitute, its sole raison d’etre being the gratification of wealthy foreign criminals. Their fans have become bloated lice, or spores of some terminal venereal disease. Even the Chelsea fans I know, and like, have taken on a kind of loathsome leer when football is discussed now.
At the other end of the spectrum, the smaller clubs have just become an inconvenience to this oligarchy; the shabby cousins whose bedraggledness is not a spur for a redistribution of the game’s riches, as you might expect in a civilised community, but an embarrassment and a gross inconvenience. Something to turn away from, and walk by on the other side. I always suspected this, but the anodyne afternoon at the Newcastle-Bolton match a few weeks ago really brought it home to me. And last night I just knew the game was up.
Which is no reflection at all on the Manchester City, a long-suffering football club whose own humiliating incarceration in the Nationwide has only fairly recently ended. But something about the match knocked the stuffing out of me.
No doubt I’ll have perked up tomorrow, eh?
Let’s change the subject. What have the Tories ever done for me? Quite a lot actually. I’ve made a few quid on their leadership struggles over the past few years, and I’m hoping to continue the run of luck today, with a bet on Iain Duncan-Smith losing his vote of confidence. The odds were very short (1/16), but it’s a total certainty, and I’ve put a horribly large sum on it. When I get home (I’m writing this on the train), I’ll know whether I’ve earned enough to pay for a couple of good meals out, or (gulp) whether I’ll be cancelling our holiday in Cuba next year.
And if you’re an Ebay enthusiast, you may shortly see an ad for a breadmaker. One careless owner…
[Phew…]
