I’m still chained to a project in Leeds but have shifted my patch of personal space to Huddersfield, a windy, stoney, spare and boney sort of town on the western fringe of the Pennines. I’m an urbanite by birth but cities are claustrophobic places, and sleeping over the shop makes it worse. So I’ve moved about 18 miles away, to a place where I can breathe more easily and perhaps see a little more clearly.
It’s a not a wholly new running landscape. The first few months of this web log has me tramping over the tops from Flockton on a damp and blistery 12 miler in the approach to the 2002 London marathon. I was here again a few months ago for a Sunday morning trot along a frozen canal towpath.
Running isn’t just about discovery; it’s the rediscovery of things you know, or thought you knew. I lived here throughout the 1990s, and know the place as well as a Londoner ever can know a place like this. It’s time to look at it again, and from another angle. For a place where I spent 9 years of my life, this remains strangely alien territory. Yes, I know the layout of the town. I know its taverns well, and where to get the best takeaway curries (the Medina Bismillah on the Bradford Road), although this information may not serve me too well on the current trip.
The people of the town were always something of a closed book to me, as no doubt I must have seemed to them. There is a strange paradox about Yorkshire. What the Americans call “a disconnect” between their public face and what seems like their real selves. No one flies the flag more vigorously than these people. Just today I read that a survey has shown that the people of Yorkshire have higher self esteem than anywhere else in the north of the country. It’s bluster. Perhaps a bit like the American need for constant mutual reassurance. The belief that if they keep telling each other how marvellous they are, it will come true. Mass positive thinking. Maybe I never really understood the people of Huddersfield, but in my own experience, scratch the surface and you find the opposite. Submissiveness, resignation, acceptance. Peer into the Pennine soul and you find a kind of raw, windswept desolation to match the terrain. I find it quite attractive.
This morning I was out at 7am, chugging up and down the familiar inclines in the town centre. It’s not a big place, and I exhausted the streets shortly before they exhausted me. So I dipped down onto the Leeds Road, left onto Great Northern Street, beneath the railway bridge where Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, left the neatly disembowelled corpse of Helen Rytka under a tarpaulin, then up past the Slubbers Arms towards one of the streets I lived on for a while.
I chose to run up here not because I once belonged to it, but because it’s a bloody steep hill, and I need to run more hills. Why? My name’s down for the Burnham Beeches half marathon in just 2½ weeks from now. I did it in 2002. Even if it’s not so blisteringly hot, it will certainly be just as hilly.
2½ weeks? Cripes. We’ll see.
