It’s good to be back in the groove. Worked from home today, so had the chance to get out his afternoon for 6.44 miles in the rain.
I left home with no idea where I was headed, or how long I was going to be. I needed some sort of boundary, so before I left, I trapped a huge potato and manhandled it into the oven. It meant I wouldn’t be tempted to get carried away and run twenty miles unless I wanted to return home to the sight of a caravan of fire engines and thousands of horrified villagers fleeing for their lives.
So I chugged up to the crossroads, a bruised young spirit in search of the devil. If you’ve not heard the story, the young Robert Johnson apparently upset the great old bluesman Son House in some juke joint near Clarksdale, Mississippi, in around 1930. Son House ridiculed his basic guitar style, and Johnson vanished for a while, returning as a virtuoso blues player and singer. What happened in the intervening period? The tale is that Johnson met the devil at the crossroads — as you do — and sold his soul in exchange for becoming a great bluesman. There is an alternative theory. I note that one controversial author attributes his improvement to “a year of intensive practice”. Naaah. It wouldn’t seem quite the same, somehow.
I’m one of the many who’ve stood at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale and pondered the matter. I’d hate to think I’d wasted my time. In time-honoured Mississippi bluesman style, Johnson died aged 27 after drinking a bottle of whisky laced with strychnine, following an altercation over a married woman.
Anyway, so I’m approaching the village crossroads with the Hellhounds On My Trail, wondering whether to sell my soul to the deer park and wood in the north, or to the bird lake and canal in the south….
The bird lake and canal won out, I suspect because it meant I avoided the bus stop, which in turn meant I avoided running through the herd of grunting schoolkids gorging on greasy Co-op sausage rolls, and spoiling for a spot of old-person-disparagement.
A mile later, I was at the lake. I’d been here a couple of Sundays ago, releasing the coot with the dodgy leg. We’d found it in the corner of the garden, limping disconsolately round the pond. There was something clearly wrong with its leg, but when we approached, it flapped away and skulked in the compost heap. You can’t imagine how exciting this was to urbanites like us. What should we do? In the end, we rang the RSPCA for advice and they said they’d send someone round. “Just pop it in a box for us”, was the final instruction before the nice man hung up.
Eh? Pop it in a box? Easier said than done. Half an hour later, we’d given up the wild coot chase. In another explosion of feathers and sqwawking, it had vanished into a massive laurel bush and would probably never be seen again. But then the RSPCA lady turned up and said something along the lines of “leave this to me”, and similarly disappeared into the dense bush. I half expected Archie “Moonlight” Graham to step back out, fifty years younger. But instead we got the same lady, a little more red-faced than heretofore, clutching a compliant coot by the scruff of the neck.
The prognosis was good, so I had the rare experience of travelling in an RSPCA van down to the local wildlife lake. Crikey, if you think a student’s bedroom is smelly, you need to travel in one of these things. I didn’t like to ask what was rustling and groaning in another cage behind my head, but whatever it was, it smelt bad. Whatever it was, the coot was back there with it. After being chased round a garden by two hollering humans for half an hour, then plucked from the heart of a bush by a plump lady in uniform, and thrust into a box in the back of a van, it must have been saying its prayers and thinking: “Man, I’m going for a burton here, and no mistake.”
But instead we took it to the lake and released it. How nice to see it swimming away, glancing back at us a couple of times to make sure this was really happening. “Must have died and gone to heaven”, it seemed to be thinking.
I took a seat in my inner multiscreen and replayed these happy scenes once more this afternoon, as I plodded round the lake. I was hoping to see a bar-tailed godwit, and I may well have done, but I’ve no idea what a bar-tailed godwit looks like, so I’ll never know.
A mile later, as I headed off towards the canal, the rain started. But this is summer rain, so it’s OK.
I had my hair cut today. Paula, my exceptionally talented hairdresser, was confiding in me that she’d like to start running but didn’t fancy having to do it in the rain. I was explaining how liberating and how anarchic it is to run, and that running in the rain and the cold, semi-naked, while everyone around you is stressed and anxious and coated in a dozen layers of cloth and plastic and leather, strangely confused and directionless, like nicely wrapped Christmas presents with no delivery instructions, is to start to truly understand how modern life removes us from the natural world of which we are a part. By stripping all that stuff away, we reveal ourselves to the world, and the world in turn reveals itself to us. Running illuminates the gulf between the freedom we think we have, and the actually have. It’s there for the taking. Suddenly exposed, like a burglar at the end of a torch-beam, we’re shown the target and the direction to go in.
At least, I told Paula that running in the rain is fun, which I think amounts to the same thing. The other stuff is what it led me to think as I skipped through the long grass of a neglected field, and on down the towpath.
It continued raining, and I continued running. I began to fantasise about the baked potato that awaited me. Hot molten butter and mustard, perhaps some tuna or egg mayo, and a thick sprinkling of coarse-ground pepper. Do other runners think about food? I pretend I get all philosophical when I run. But really, it’s food, food, food.
Listened to most of an episode of Phedippidations. First time in a while. But I gave up halfway through, when he launched into a long preachy bit about how great the American army is, and how he’d be proud of his teenage son if he joined up. Oh shut up Steve, I’m not interested. So I switched to shuffle mode and for the remaining half hour filled my head with the Beatles, John Martyn, REM, and some contemplative John Surman. Track du Jour was going to be Ticket To Ride for its irrepressible early-Beatles joie de vivre, but just as I was crunching up the gravel drive of home, Joni Mitchell and Little Green nipped in to snatch the title. Its multi-layered melancholy overwhelmed me, just as I was entering that slightly delicate, vulnerable post-run mode.
But back onto a more manly agenda: after nearly seven damp miles, I couldn’t wait to get my teeth into some carbohydrate. Threw open the kitchen door, and waited for my nostrils to fill with rich, tempting roasted-potato fumes.
But none came. Eh?
I’d forgotten to turn the bastard oven on.
You can run, you can run, tell my good friend Willie Brown.
You can run, you can run, tell my good friend Willie Brown.
Now I’m standing at them crossroads, and I believe I’m sinking down.
They say that “the blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad”, and for a moment or two, I felt bad. But then I resolved not to let an unexpectedly uncooked tuber come between me and happiness.
After the on-off regime of the past three weeks, this was a good distance to get under my belt again, and I’ll aim to do something similar on Sunday. If that goes well, that’s it. I can declare myself ready and waiting for the start of marathon training next week.
Hurrah!
