Something old, something new.
This evening I took to the hills. Or to the hill. One hill, but consumed, sicked up and re-eaten four times.
Dublin and Boston are not flat races, so I have to get used to the undulant way. Besides which, hill training will, they say, transform me into a herculean athlete at long last. It’s a good thing to do, regardless of hilly races to come. It’s part of my plan to mix things up a bit.
I grumble that West Berkshire is flat, but it isn’t really. We don’t have the craggy monsters of Yorkshire and Cumbria or the lesser, but still formidable, climbs of Sussex and Surrey, but there are enough ascents round here to satisfy the runner. There’s one local road in particular made up of three or four good sized hills in rapid succession. Struggling through those 1½ or so miles is quite a workout. The only reason I’ve not done it more often is that it’s a narrow, twisty, busy road with no pavement. I’d say the life expectancy of a regular runner on this road wouldn’t be too high. Around a fortnight.
But I did once discover an overgrown bridle path off this road, leading to a rarely used steep hill, and this is where I headed this evening. According to my GPS watch, the hill is around a fifth of a mile. Enough for hill reps. I struggled up and down four times, which is OK for a first session. Next time I’ll add a rep. Next time? Yes, the plan is to do this once a week.
A couple of days ago I spring-cleaned my iPod playlist. Out with most of the old, and replaced with another tranche of… mostly old. I was glad I’d retained Purple Haze. I needed it on the third hill. And I was delighted to learn how neatly the Kaiser Chiefs’ I Predict a Riot fell in with my pace. But tonight’s track du jour was Soft Cell’s iconic cover of Tainted Love. From an era that most of us old gits in the RC community ignore, but one I have many fond memories of.
When you’re happily married, as I am, it doesn’t seem to be the done thing to mention ex-girlfriends. But it’s hard to hear Tainted Love without wondering what became of Jane, my other half for around 7 years in the eighties. It was an important era for me. University, extended travels in India, wine trade, settling back in London with my first mortgage, Thatcher, Ken Livingstone’s GLC parties… Exciting and dynamic times, all experienced with Jane. When I hear Tainted Love, I think of those late-night student union discos and blottotastic parties. She’d once met the band, and would often mention the fact to bystanders when this song appeared. It’s very eighties, and still thrills me the way it did when churned out at throbbing disco volume.
Back then, I couldn’t have thought that 25 or so years later, I’d be listening to the song on a wafer of an MP3 player as I willingly trotted up and down a hill. ‘Joggers’ were little more than freaks of nature to me in those days.
It’s fun, but it’s sad, to have these ancient, flickering episodes involuntarily replayed in one’s mind.
More memory fodder of a less personal sort earlier in the day, when the credits finally stopped rolling on Tony Blair’s premiership, and the new chap, fellow by the name of Brown, stepped in. Blair has been an extraordinary, though far from perfect, prime minister. Brown promises us steadfastness, and a more traditional captaincy. It seems we’ve had enough of the Blair experiment. It was spectacular and entertaining, but like all theatre, it’s no substitute for the real world.
