I called my elderly mother this evening. “How are you?” was my innocent question. Pause. “I looked in the mirror today”, she said, ” And I saw Death staring back at me….” Maybe she’s been a closet Tottenham fan all these years. It’s been a wretched week. I’m ill. Or something. My back has been aching all week, I have a rash across my chest, and my stomach sort of hurts.… READ MORE.... …
Blog Posts
Ah yes, running. Isn’t that the one where you take most of your clothes off and put one foot in front of the other for a while? At a slightly faster rate than if you were wandering down to the pub? Mmmm, it’s all coming back to me now…. It’s been a while. Long enough. I have this experience once or twice every year.… READ MORE.... …
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. It took me until halfway through the Copenhagen Marathon to adopt a hybrid of 99 Red Balloons and Mister Tambourine Man as the soundtrack to the day. By contrast, Zurich Marathon day was just a few seconds old when I found what I really didn’t know I was looking for. I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’, Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world… Alarm goes, eyes creak open.… READ MORE.... …
And almost immediately, my vow of silence is broken. But then I didn’t expect to run a race today. Sometimes, you just run a 20 mile cross-country race by accident. Tim of this parish, our 175-Mile Race Running Correspondent, will be reading this with tears in his eyes. I’d forgotten about this one. Then last night, I remembered it. The Compton Downland Challenge has been rebranded this year, in line with the trend to put a beaming smile on the face of heartbursting athletic martyrdom.… READ MORE.... …
We’re still a story without an end, though the denouement is close… I’ve been following Sweder’s forum diary with self-flagellatory envy. We have marathons booked for the same day, April 9; his in Paris, mine in Zurich. I suspect that the two tales, when they eventually appear, will exhibit markedly different endings. The string of hard-fought, non-stop, hilly 20 milers he can proudly pack for the journey will be more than enough to see him through.… READ MORE.... …
I recently bought an iPod Nano, and have been teasing myself with its possibilities. Started off with a few rather unsatisfying weeks, re-exploring the less hospitable, outer territories of my own MP3-ised CD collection. Since then I’ve been back on safer ground — the spoken word. It’s a wholly different experience. Being a lifelong BBC Radio 4 addict, this shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was.… READ MORE.... …
DO NOT USE LIFT IN CASE OF FIRE It amuses me, anyway, even if it doesn’t quite come up to the high standards of semiotic ambiguity set by DOGS MUST BE CARRIED, seen next to the escalators on the London Underground. I’ve had three days of very mild debauchery in Dusseldorf. Nothing too extreme, but in a Champions League week that featured critical 2nd legs for 4 British teams, it was impossible to avoid the siren calls from McLaughlin’s Irish Bar in the Altstadt with its 3 large TV screens, each showing a different game.… READ MORE.... …
Here we go: Positive thinking is A Good Thing; negative thinking is A Bad Thing. I understand the value of positive thinking, and I am, therefore, a positive thinker, rarely falling victim to gratuitous negativity, which I find corrosive, exasperating and boring. OK? Right. I need to get those thoughts nailed to the top of this entry, so they can flutter freely at the periphery of your vision while you read the next bit.… READ MORE.... …
No run today, but I did go for a spot of Pilates at the local school. It’s a deceptively gentle activity. Supine ballet. Here I lie on my floor mat, waggling an ankle, or drawing arcs in the air with my arms, while hypnotic New Age music oozes from a portable CD player. At the end of it, you tend to think: Is that it then?… READ MORE.... …
Here comes the sun. I’m a big fan of the Today programme, never more so than since it came under hostile fire from the Blair government and its multifarious satellites, following the infamous Gilligan broadcast. So when, this morning, the impossibly seductive whisper of Charlotte Green revealed that today would be the coldest day of the year, I believed her.… READ MORE.... …