Me, I’m to blame. It’s all my fault. I’m a middle class, white male, and I’m a ‘boomer’.
Over the last few days, I’ve separately read, or heard, that all of these things make me a thoroughly wicked person, responsible for the ills of the world. It’s one of the reasons I need sometimes to take off my clothes and go running through the neighbourhood. It’s a sackcloth and ashes thing. “Here I am! It’s all my fault! Come and get me…!”
I almost added: “If you can catch me”, but I am all too catchable at the moment. I’m on one of those irritating weight plateaux where, despite an exemplary diet and exercise regime, I hover around the same reading on the scales. The last 3 days have shown exactly the same figure, down to a fifth of a pound. It’s tempting to be dispirited, but I’ve hung around this bus stop many times before, and know that I shouldn’t give up
just yet. Pass me that celery stick.
Here is the news:
I’ve entered the two Christmas-holiday races I wasn’t able to do last time around. The Cliveden 6 mile cross country, and the Hyde Park New Year’s Day 10K. I’ve done both twice before, but not since 2005. Despite the time gap, I still number both among my favourite events of the year. I must have entered and no-showed these races more times than I’ve actually run them. Things crop up. Last year, my plans were scuppered by that Boxing Day calf strain. Previous years, it’s been the untimely arrival of a holiday hangover, or a vicious attack of man-flu.
Cliveden, as the erudite Tom Roper reminded me the other day, played a significant part in the recent political history of this nation. Cliveden House, in whose grounds along the Thames the race takes place, was the venue, in 1961**, of the fateful meeting between John Profumo and Christine Keeler, a liaison which led directly to the fall of the Tory administration.
By tradition, the race takes place on the coldest day of the year. The entire estate becomes an icebox, detached from the world beyond. Freezing ears and numbed feet. You know your feet are still there by the crunching of the frosty gravel. But they do thaw out in time for the outrageous staircase up the hillside (ascended twice), the treacherously slippery woodland slopes, and the muddy riverside towpath.
So what’s the attraction? It’s something to do with the knowledge that you are doing this while other people are slumped in armchairs, peering through one glassy eye at a rerun of Morecambe and Wise circa 1974 on the TV, while the kids are entering their 72nd consecutive hour of squealing/bawling/puking.
Much the same holds true of the Hyde Park 10K on New Year’s Day. A quite different course: flat and open. But I love this regal, historic open space, and to be here on the first day of the year, a bank holiday, while the world is still abed after the revelry of the night before, is to experience something so rarely found in central London — a sense of solitude. And yes, I mean that, even though there are several hundred other people in the race (see pic at the top of this page). To drive through empty streets, and to be able to park up near Kensington Palace without having your car blown up or towed away, and to wander up to the bandstand past the Albert Memorial and the Serpentine, without the sound of traffic and the presence of worried-looking, hurrying men in suits, is a true pleasure. This time around, it will finally be the occasion when I get my 10K PB, so am doubly looking forward to it.
A quick reprise of recent activity:
Sunday was 2:20 hours of cycling and gym, including treadmill intervals; Monday was 10.55 miles on the bike in 66 minutes; and this evening I managed another hour in the gym, including some more treadmill intervals.
I usually end up warming down on the static bike, reading (pause) the Daily Mail. Eh? My excuse M’Lud, is that it is provided free of charge. And anyway, it is sort of fun to read, in a masochistic kind of a way. Especially during the Tory Party conference. Among the articles lionising each pipsqueak speaker (it’s not only policemen who get younger as one ages), and comment columns cooing over the ‘bravery’ of Chancellor-in-waiting, George Osborne, I found a book extract that I started to read. It’s by some failed writer in Herefordshire who has identified the cause of his inability to make headway in the literary world. No, it’s not his manifest inability to write properly. Oh no, it’s all the fault of those living in London and the south east. We are some sort of conspiratorial cabal. Oh dear.
Me, I’m to blame. It’s all my fault. I’m a middle class, white male, a ‘boomer’, and I live in the south-east.
Any more for any more…? Come and get me….
