Sunday 1 June 2008 – Newbury 10K

If life is a to-do list, I managed a big tick on Friday evening, in Nottingham, when I finally got to see the glorious Liza Minnelli.

Cabaret — the movie — was a portal to my adulthood.

It won Best Film Oscar in 1973, and I clearly recall bunking off school to see it. What drew me to it? Don’t know. I guess it seemed avant-garde and intellectual, which sums up the adolescent, antisocial phase I was passing through at the time.

What I do know is that a child entered the Odeon Leicester Square that day — and was never seen again.

It’s hard to identify exactly what it is about the movie that bludgeoned away so much of my childhood. A penny dropped somewhere. The movie is a puzzle: layer upon layer of transparent contrasts and contradictions. But once merged, they form a window into something previously concealed. The film has potency but you have to chase it. It’s something linked to that bitter-sweet cocktail of raucous fun and personal tragedy; private lives and private pain, all silhouetted against the illuminated, threatening, red and black of the Third Reich. Is it a comedy or tragedy? A drama or a musical? I couldn’t work it out, and I still can’t. The songs and the singers were of a kind I’d not permitted myself to consider before. Until that moment, cabaret and cabaret singers were a parent thing. An old bloke’s entertainment. No more.

Here. Do it. Treat yourself to the final six minutes of Cabaret. Those final frames are as powerful now as they were then.

I suspect I fell in love with Liza Minnelli that afternoon, and despite her exploded life, she retains enough Minnelli essence to remain something exceedingly rare: a genuine star.

M and I discussed this in the theatre foyer before the show. The difference between true stars and mere celebrities. We have a deluge of the latter, but a tiny trickle of the former. Who else is there, we wondered. Clint Eastwood. Paul Newman. Barbara Streisand. Paul McCartney. Nelson Mandela. Stan Bowles. (She didn’t agree with all my choices.)

She’s 62 now, has had both hips replaced, but Minnelli still has what it takes. My camera phone doesn’t do her any justice but here’s a clip I found on YouTube from the London show two days earlier that does a better job.

We nearly managed a superb double bill when we discovered that the Dalai Lama was appearing at the adjacent theatre earlier the same evening, but it turned out to be an even hotter ticket than Liza’s. What a brilliant contrast that would have provided.

More contrasts were on the bill yesterday, when we headed out of Nottingham to explore some bits of England we’d managed to miss up till now. We’re members of the National Trust, and always try to get round a few places each year. I suspect we just about get our money back on annual membership, but even if we don’t, it’s a worthy cause.

We bagged a couple of good ones this weekend. The Workhouse was an eye-opener. I associated workhouses with Dickensian times, and hadn’t realised that workhouses were still in use up until 1948, when the introduction of the National Health Service finally swept them away.

The Southwell Workhouse, donated to the NT around 6 years ago, is a fine piece of Victorian architecture. Most of the furniture is long gone, but the walls and the yards separating the men from the women from the children, and the able-bodied from the infirm, are perfectly preserved, as are the dormitories and the officers of the clerk and master. It’s one of those places that naughty children should be dragged to, to help them realise that their lives are not quite as terrible as they assume.

Next up was Belton House, just a few miles down the A1, but it could have belonged to another planet, such was the contrast. Belton is a much more typical NT property: the information that the house has been used as a “film location for the BBC’s Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Tom Jones” probably tells you all you need to know about the style of this 17th century mansion and its beautiful state of preservation. Good old NT.

Time for home. I set the sat-nav to avoid motorways, so we spent the next three hours or so snaking across country, through a stream of delightful villages with outlandish names. How very pleasant it all was, though I felt an ache each time we passed another charm-washed country pub. They’d have sparked a kind of longing at any time, but seemed particularly enticing yesterday — early on a Saturday evening in late spring, heading towards the longest day. But beer was out of the question. There was a race to get done in the morning.

The Newbury 10K is a new event, sponsored by Bayer — you know, the gynaecological fungicide people.

I was pleased to see this one appear on the calendar. The town is local to me, and, well, it’s just the sort of place that really should have a decent 10K. In fact, a half marathon wouldn’t go amiss but let’s take it one step at a time.

Weather was perfect for a race. Cool and damp, but not cold, and no sunshine. I drove into Newbury with 20 minutes to hoot-off, feeling slightly anxious. Nothing to do with the prospect of the race, which I’d frankly given no thought to, but to the prospect of finding somewhere to park. Ever since the Fleet Half in 2002, I’ve assumed the worst. (Interesting that while Fleet was apparently a life-haunting experience, it hasn’t prevented me from turning up at a town-centre race with just 20 minutes to go.)

Jeeze, have you finished boring us with your tedious neuroses? You have? Good. Let’s get down to that start line and let these people go. They have more useful things to do. Like gaze at that damp spot above the picture rail.

Newbury is a fine town, overflowing with please-enter-me canal-side pubs. The High Street is lined with opportunities for pushing hamburgers and creamy desserts into one’s face. I adjust my blinkers, and wait for the race to start.

I notice that there aren’t too many iPod zombies around. I count about 30 to 35 in the crowd of 450 starters. Two headphoned girls in front of me at the start were hollering at each other:

Whatchoo listening to?

Eh?

Whatchoo listening to?

Eh?

I’m liss’nin’ to Bob Marley

Eh?

BOB MARLEY!

Oh!

Whatchoo listening to?

Eh?

I moved back even further. A few minutes later, we were off, and being funnelled through the narrow high street, parading past the thick lines of grinning, politely applauding locals.

Within a few seconds, I felt an elbow dig into my right arm, and a young guy lumbered past me. Wearing headphones, of course. He had no idea he’d made contact with me. A few seconds later, something similar happened on my left side. Again, an elbow across me, this time into my chest. I shouted “Oy!”, but nothing was going to penetrate the higher plane onto which this glassy-eyed, earphoney had rapidly ascended. And then, another fifty or so yards further on, an older guy in front of me, again, wearing white iPod earphones, just suddenly stopped, and started waving at a small child standing on the pavement. Oh for christ’s sake. This time I actually struck the bloke. I whacked him across his shoulder as I passed, and shouted “Watch where you’re going!”

His response? He spun round and looked round after me and, assuming that I was someone who’d recognised him, and giving him a friendly pat on the back, actually grinned and waved at me too. Idiots, the lot of them.

I wasn’t going to let it bother me. This was just a mild training run. I’d had no thoughts about pace or targets, and had no need for a race strategy. All I wanted was a steady jog in a different environment, and that’s what I got.

We quickly turned left off the high street and threaded our way down a narrow side street. Then whoosh! We were going up. This was something I hadn’t bargained for. In fact, the first three kilometres were a pretty relentless climb, up through a residential part of town that I didn’t know existed. The RC Sussex boys would not have been fazed by this challenge, but for me it was something more than an inconvenience. Despite the discomfort, and my impressive lack of fitness and excessive lardiness, this was way too early in the race to even think about walking, so I just had to put my head down and chug away for the best part of 20 minutes. Not much fun.

At last we turned off the roads and onto a flatter off-road section. The mud remained manageable, never threatening my ankles. Then through some woods, where I tried keeping in step with the cadence of a cuckoo. This didn’t work as well as the podrunner track I’d used on last weekend’s long run, but I have to say it was a rather prettier sound. It reminded me of what I miss when I run with music.

Single-file across a bumpy field, beneath an underpass and onto the canal tow path for a couple of peaceful kilometres. Here I fell into conversation with a girl who seemed willing to plod along at my pace, and we ended up chatting all the way back to the finish line — probably half the race. I never did discover her name, but as often happens in these situations, we were able to exchange a great stock of information about jobs, family, running history, eating habits and aspirations.

And that was the story of the Newbury 10K. After the initial long incline, I don’t think I looked at my watch once until after we’d crossed the finish line. Had I done so, I would have seen that this was my second slowest 10K. But this didn’t matter. PBs are not a thing of the past, but they won’t be a focus until I’ve dropped at least another 15 pounds. Until then, races are about participation, and variety. I turned up to help remember what races are all about, and to add a little chopped red chilli to my plain meat-and-potatoes training schedule. The Newbury 10K reminded me that there is running life outside my home patch, and there is fun to be had and people to meet, if only we make the smallest effort.