Donald Trump’s comedy barnet, part sculpture, part hibernating mammal, is rightly considered suitable for late-night viewing only, so the TV series constructed in its honour, The Apprentice, means little sleep for the tiny community of people entertained both by weighty business issues and the irresistible bitchiness of (superbly-misnamed) "reality TV".
Another well-past-midnight climb up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire meant I’d got home from work feeling too tired to go out for a run this evening. But after dumping my work clothes and staring out of the window at the fading daylight, at the warm breeze rattling the trees at the end of the garden, I’d no choice.
These are perfect evenings for getting out of the house and into the countryside. September in England may be autumn, but it’s autumn in the arms of summer, and should be celebrated.
Sticking to my recent routine, I walked for the first few hundred yards before veering away into open country at a semi-jog. Recently, I’ve been making it up as I go along. Formal intervals, informal fartlek, hell-for-leather sprinting, leaning on a field gate pretending to stretch my calf muscles, strolling, speed-walking… you name it. If it’s a method of two-legged self-propulsion, I’ve been doing it.
Tonight I strapped myself into the iPod and blasted off to the sound of Modern Times, Bob Dylan’s new album. It’s largely treacley, phlegmy R ‘n’ B but it’s Dylan, and we fans treat him like we treat most OAPs — with a certain amount of patronising tolerance. On this website, I’m the only Dylanite for miles, but if you want to check out anything, try "Workingman’s Blues", which includes a line which seems splendidly inappropriate for a pop song: "The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down".
I had some recent correspondence about Dylan with fellow QPR fan and Brightonian Ron Gould. Ron is a long time folkie, and has stories to die for. Tragically, he hates Dylan, despite being part of the London and Greenwich Village folk scenes in the early sixties (or perhaps because he was there). He takes up the story about an album session:
"Well, as I remember it, the people that were playing were von Schmidt, Fariña, Ethan Signer and Bob Dylan… I sang choruses on some of the things — I definitely sang on ‘Glory Glory’ — but I can’t make any claims to fame… There was the tape-recorder, sitting on the shop counter, and just one microphone, into which everyone in the room had to sing and play. We were all so primitive that everything was done pretty much in one take… What happened was that Richard and Eric von Schmidt were there first and they recorded a blues… then Signer turned up… and then, about two tunes later, that’s when Dylan came in with the bottles of Guinness… but he didn’t have an opener… Then Rick von Schmidt handed Dylan an already opened bottle of Guinness, and Dylan took it up to his mouth, took a swig, pulled a face and said, My God what is this? And then he tipped the rest of it on the floor… Doug [Dobell] didn’t like his shop floor being messed up… But after that, it seemed to calm down and there was just a lot of playing and drinking. Basically that was it. It was just a one-off that we did and nobody thought it would ever come to anything…"
Most of the Running Commentary community is already anti-Dylan. What will they think when they discover he also despises Guinness?
Such random worries kept me occupied for most of the next 40 minutes. After Dylan, I shuffled on through Tommy Makem, Loudon Wainwright III, Lloyd Cole and Leonard Cohen, before realising that I was sweating with effort for the first time in many months. More than that, the run:walk ratio was now reaching towards 5:1, from the 1:1 of last week. I could feel myself beaming, albeit through gritted teeth, as I crunched along the gravel path through the deer park.
By now, the sun had gone. Instead, the moon hung in the sky like a newly-lit lantern, illuminating the open fields and long straight road back home. I’m still a long, long way out. Worse, I’m still in the dungeon — but for 45 minutes this evening, I was able to get the trapdoor open an inch or two — just enough to get a glimpse of the Promised Land, and just enough to keep the enthusiasm, the effort and the resolve burning as brightly as tonight’s moon.
As I panted past the long window of the Red Lion, I noticed a horribly plump drinker pointing at me and cackling derisively. Sometimes it helps to see oneself as others see you. I’m not talking about me here — I’m talking about him. The gloomy truth is that for the last few months I’ve been him rather than the guy running past.
In my imagination, I could see myself jabbing my forefinger back at the fat beer guzzler. I have only two words for him:
"You’re fired!"
