Yesterday?
Yesterday morning I was up at sunrise, running 5 miles in record time while the world was still comatose.
A couple of hours later, rattling with endorphins, I march into my boss’s office and tell him where he’s going wrong. He rewards me with a stellar promotion and a payrise that promises me permanent financial security.
Y’know, I sometimes wonder why I don’t just fabricate the lot. Ever since someone called into question my balmy summer of love with the French diplomat’s German wife in Darjeeling, I’ve thought, “Why bother, really?”
Take Two.
Yesterday I overslept. I went to work and felt ill all day. I was hoarse and shivery, and every now and then I would wipe the sweat from my temples — and not the sort of temples you get in Darjeeling, through whose sacred grounds Hildegarde and I would walk after chess and late afternoon tea (Orange Pekoe Unbroken Leaves) at Glenary’s, and before meeting up with the prison governor for spicy snacks and ice cold beer and whisky chasers, as we were wont to do.
1982.
The same year that QPR got to the FA Cup Final. Twice.
And a great Bordeaux vintage.
Five years later I was in Pomerol, picking grapes and getting drunk every night. It was the summer of the Chateau Palmer story that I once mentioned here.
Early one evening, poking around in a cupboard in the kitchen of the cottage we were staying in, I came across a packet of Darjeeling Orange Pekoe, so I made a small pot and sat on the sunlit verandah and drunk it, grinning from ear to ear.
And then? Only one thing for it really. I uncorked a decent bottle of St Emilion. The 1982 vintage of course. I poured a large glass and held it up to watch the sun slowly sinking through it and thought about September 1982.
The very same rays that matured these grapes on the vine, were simultaneously ripening my youth in the Himalayas. Ah yes. The sun shone on me that year.
The Tea, The Tea — Isn’t that an Iris Murdoch novel?
Orange Pekoe. The very name is enough, but give me a cup, and I really am somewhere else and nowhere at all.
Better to be upbeat than beat-up. It’s what I found I’d written on my pad this morning, when I emerged from the weekly team meeting. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever written anything during a meeting apart from the date. I have drawersful of notebooks filled with pages on which is written nothing but “Mtg:”, followed by a date and a doodle or two.
But today? Today when I looked, I’d written Better to be upbeat than beat-up. It’s now my motto of the month, even though the month ends in less than two hours.
But it’s where I am, and there are worse places I could be. I’ve been to them over the past couple of weeks. But I’ve escaped again, and here I am, limping away from the hole in the fence. Upbeat.
Still haven’t run, but it’s OK. I’m optimistic and excited and confident about it all again now. I’m just slightly ill still. Let us not be precipitous.
Talking of lettuce, I’ve been eating excessively healthily for three days now, and the benefits are starting to ooze through my pores. Energy, and a positive outlook. That’s me at the moment. I’m looking forward to getting out there and running, more so than I think I have in a long time.
That’s it.
