Out at seven this morning for a 6-miler. Longer and further than intended, but sometimes the occasion builds its own uncontrollable mood — a sort of borrowed zeitgeist — that sweeps you into places not shown on the map you’d drawn in your own mind.
So I went for a half hour, 3-mile jog along the canal, and returned instead with six miles and no canal. Instead, I found myself being drawn around a lake that I should really visit more often. I’ve run here only once before. The surrounding path is just one mile but well worth including in a run. Intensely peaceful — and there’s always the chance of spotting a bar-tailed godwit — evidently.
This morning I saw no humans, and heard nothing synthetic. Just sunshine and birdsong.
I considered another circuit, but running on grass seems to drag the strength from my legs, so instead I headed along a track that runs close to the canal, though you never actually see it.
The narrow lane takes me past the Thames Valley Police training school. I try to look like a Deputy Chief Constable. Car drivers, erring on the side of caution, are always courteous when I run around these parts. Just in case I’m the plodding plod.
Eventually, I cross the canal but decide against returning home along the towpath. Time is getting short, so I continue along the lane, over the railway line, past the spot where seven people died in November 2004 (BBC report, and the RC entry).
The final stretch, along the A4, is the antidote to all that’s gone before. The bucket of cold water that wrenches you from your dream. Loud, busy, dangerous. Horrible.
I made up a word recently. You know that rather embarrassing and annoying situation when you go through a door, and there’s someone following behind, and they are just at that distance from you where it seems rude not to hold the door open, but just a bit too far to be comfortable for either party?
Dawkwardness.
