Category: Uncategorized

With the tedious predictability of tediously predictable things, I turned the ankle again (twice, actually, but only the second time hurt) while doing some mild orienteering in the Brecon Beacons. So a fortnight after the original injury I my left ankle is still swollen and giving occasional pangs of pain.

I’ve put a neoprene support on it today, but it means I haven’t run for three weeks so I think I’m pulling out of St Neots next weekend – which is a shame as there was a friendly challenge going on with some buddies. Shame.

Also – no reply from three different email addresses on the West 4 Harriers website, so they obviously don’t want me to join :oP . Will have to look further afield.

In other news, I have been left home alone this weekend. The temptation to do something with beetroot and gelatine is proving quite a challenge. But seeing as the footie is on and the sofa is quite comfy, marshmallow experiments will have to wait.

If there is anyone who has read this blog for a while, they will know that one of my favourite running maxims is ‘pride comes before a fall’.

I’ve been on a real high since Abingdon. My workplace has been sapping the joy out of my life for months, and the past few weeks in particular have been poisonous, to say the least. But all, or most, of this could be ignored for those brief hours between me, the clock and the course.

What makes the work situation hurt more than it perhaps should, is that I have a reasonable talent for stringing a sentence together – not always an intelligible sentence – but quite often a funny one. Except when I’m talking about badgers. Or as Listy points out, when the sherberts have left the fountain. So. I want – I have always wanted – to be a writer. A paid writer. But somehow, I just lack the… lack the ‘something’. Confidence. Tenacity. Ambition. Drive. Focus. I don’t know – all of the above.

All of these emotions / feelings I get from running, and running long distances in particular. It’s not really a physical challenge at the end of the day, it’s a mental one. It’s an entirely optional activity. And it’s a solitary one. Sure, you can run with others, and get encouragement from other runners or the side of the road, but ultimately you run with and against you. You have to learn to like yourself a little more if you’re going to run long distances, because you’re going to spend a lot of time in your own company.

Anyhoo. The point. I’ve been on a high. I want to take it to the next level. I’ve looked at a race schedule. I’ve emailed my local club (no reply yet after three days which isn’t encouraging, but never mind). I’ve decided to finally ditch my New Balance loyalty and try something else – it was the pain of the various blisters and other things going on with my feet that slowed me down last week.

I’ve been reading Haruki Murakami’s ‘Things I talk about when I talk about running’. It’s inspiring – he’s inspiring. And a lot of what he says about the relationship between being a runner and being a writer ring true. He sets himself a benchmark of 36 miles a week as a minimum for ‘serious’ training – he’s run umpteen marathons (and lets not forget the 20+ novels translated into 40+ languages). So I should take the man seriously.

Listy also gives me phenomenal support. Fetchland’s reaction to my post about the race was really ‘aw shucks’ cool and as you will see from the gallery in a minute, I have No8 giving me earache after every PB (have a look at the photo of us – he used to be 2 stone heavier than I am there (107kg) – that’s why he’s a legend).

So. Motivated. New goals. Fep work. Excited. So I go out this morning and make the following mistakes:
1. I’m hungover. Using the kind of logic that only drunk people can, I had planend this as my last hungover run. Like I said. Cock.
2. I wore new trainers.
3. I wore new and different socks – Thorlos- as I thought it might be cold. Note that I didn’t wear long sleeved shirt or hat or gloves. It’s the socks that matter apparently. See point 1.
Points 2 and 3 will be relevant in a minute.
4. I ran a new route. New beginnings and all that.
5. I had planned a nice gentle pootle. However, the first time I encountered running traffic I stepped up the gears to show off a little. Like I said, running like a cock.

All these combine at Hammersmith bridge. I run past a swishing ponytail on the bridge, make a big show of arcing for the switchback ramp to get down to the Thames Path, start pounding down it. I’ve only been down this ramp once before. I’m going quite fast – hit some gravel – my left shoe catches, my foot slips in the socks – end result I turn my ankle over at speed and only by sheer force of will I don’t end up diving off the path and into the fortunately high-tide Thames. Hurts like buggery. I limped the two miles home.

I didn’t fall over. I didn’t get shot. Or mugged. Or ended up on a drip or anything. But I won’t be able to run for a few days. And it was all so avoidable.

If I hadn’t been running like a cock.

There will no doubt be a lot of these. But I’ll chip in my twopenneth. Great, great day. Up at six and trying not to order Listy about too much (NO PHILADELPHIA IN MY POST RACE SNACK, THANKYOU!). Faffing like a good ‘un. Fortunately have already decided what kit to wear and left it out to remind me that I have already decided, actually, and don’t need to change my mind several times. Coffee and various vitamin based liquids and off we go (I don’t trust my tummy with any form of solids on >15miles, not even porridge).

Listy drives and I listen to house music. I get over excited and am told to calm down. I then navigate wrong and nearly end up in Cheltenham. Or something. Anyway, we waste ten minutes, by which time the car park is almost full. I change gel strategy yet again. I get changed in the car and manage not to damage (a) me, (b) the car, or (c) our marriage. I do, however, smell strongly of Vicks and Ralgex. Listy gets over excited and I tell her to calm down.

I attempt humour in the toilets while queueing for a cubicle. Decide not to do that again. Ever.

I run out with my fat top on. I see oodles of Fetchies. I don’t talk to anyone in the starting melee. I feel shy. And fat and underprepared. I emphasise this by putting my hands in my pockets and bringing out the sign I prepared earlier. I give a posse of Fetchies a thumbs up. And BANG off we go. I start le Garmin.

By 100m it is obvious my gel strategy won’t work as the weight of ick in my pants is pulling them down. Cross, I take two out of a pocket and decide to carry them, as well as the contents of the front pockets. After giving everyone a lovely builder’s arse shot obviously. I mean, why else would I have my name on the back of my top except to make it perfectly clear whose arse cleavage they’re looking at?

Mile 1 I run past Hendo. I have never met him. But I still say ‘twat’ in my head. It’s the Fetch way. I am going faster than any of my schedules, but I’m feeling good. Lots of people run past me. Possibly to get away from arse cleavage.
Mile 2. Hendo runs past me. He’s being paced by KinkyS. This is blatantly unfair and against the rules. Random schoolgirls honk their horns at me. This never happened when I was younger.
Mile 3. Gobi shouts at me. We run past a turkey farm. I don’t know who is more ridiculous – thousands of turkeys running to the edge of their pens to gobble at us, or the hundreds of loonies wearing wicking tops. In the end, I decide Gobi wins.
Mile 4. I run past Hendo again, and pretend to be on for 3:35.
Mile 5. Me and my big mouth. First gel, about 30 mins early. I will gel in front of the next four feed stations.
Mile 6. This is a piece of piss. I am a God. I am running past people at will. Well, not exactly at will, but feeling good.
Mile 7. A FS has the temerity to run past me. I will have my revenge.
Mile 8. Is always a boring mile in marathons.
Mile 9. My lovely wife is where she said she’d be, and I shout at her. It’s what Gobi would have wanted. I also take a bag of gels and jelly babies. And suck greedily on a Lucozade teat.
Mile 10. Umm. I think this was the bit with the weird ‘running round the back of a warehouse bit’. Which was not exciting. See Superted I think. And that dastardly Hendo is about a minute behind. Next!
Mile 11. Beginning to flag a bit, but the metronome has stuck at 8:04 by the Garmin (although it’s beeping early and I know I’m running slower.
Mile 12. Fetchpoint. Bedlam. Chaos in lycra and hoodie form. Gobi shouts at me.
Mile 13. Annoying. Trail bits.
Mile 14. Ho hum. Metronome. Gobi shouts at me from a car. Leave it alone man, I’m married. *smile*
Mile 15. Metronome. Small child gives me sweets in a wrapper. I resist the temptation to run back and clock him one for idiocy.
Mile 16. Slowing a bit. Feet hurt. Nearly hit my head on some thatched cottage nonsense. I’m all for scenic, but this is not Midsomer Murders.
Mile 17. I don’t feel like I’m going faster, but the bastard Garmin keeps telling me the average pace is slipping. I’m sick of the taste of everything sweet.
Mile 18. I hit the mile marker bang on 8:10 miling pace – on for 3:35. Wife is now wearing Fetch beanie. Things must be serious. I vow never to touch another gel (until the next training plan). I suck hard from the lucozade teat. I run past a fellow clydesdale and feel like the big I am.
Mile 19. Yes. There was one. I’m beginning to go backwards. I’m trying to visualise the rest of the race as my standard run home, but my feet are having none of it. They hate me, and the horse I rode in on. My hamstrings are also having an argument and I generally feel like poo.
Mile 20. I am a running God. I am feeling good. I have 10k to run. Look at me run! People! Look at me run! I will just check my Garmin. Oh. I am running slower than ever. How the fuck is that happening? I am a running god! Look at me stride for excellence….
Mile 21. Not big, pretty or clever. I think Hendo is still a way behind me. I pass Superted. Just building up to:
Mile 22. Fetchpoint. Less like a water station and more like a seething mass of red, yellow and towelling. There is noise. Lots of noise. People have forgiven me for arse cleavage and are now shouting my name as well. I feel great. Widger runs past me like she’s left something in the pub. She goes on to PB by 20 mins. Whatever. :o)
Mile 23. Not a good mile. Definitely off my Christmas card list. It seems to wind and turn and stuff. Please God let it end soon. People start coming past me more often. I catch the FS from earlier. I realise, with a sense of overwhelming clarity, that we are ALL STARK RAVING MAD. It turns out to be her first marathon. She’ll learn.
Mile 24. No longer on my buddies list. I nearly punch a cyclist. When I say ‘nearly punch a cyclist’, I mean ‘I swore loudly at a cyclist in my head. And I don’t mean the cyclist was in my head.’
Mile 25. Oh God please let it finish.
Mile 26. With the predictability of things that are really predictable, when predicted by people who know about predicting things, Hendo and KinkyS run past me. It’s ok though, because I know this bit – this is the way from the car to the start – turn left here and there’s almost nothing left. What’s this? BASTARDS! WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME RUN AWAY FROM THE FINISH WHEN IT’S ONLY OVER THERE? I have a sense of humour failure. The FS runs past me. Whatever. Like I care. Then the clydesdale runs past me – a Wimbledon Windmiller or something *waves*. Some random Big Bugger is trying to take my Big Bugger glory! I ask a marshall if we have to do a lap of the track. He says yes. I make plans to kill him.

I enter the stadium. Like, I suspect, 99.9% of the competitors I do not see this as a Gobi-like snack to be devoured in the name of intervals. It is quite possibly THE BIGGEST LAP OF THE BIGGEST TRACK I HAVE EVER SEEN.

I struggle to maintain forward momentum around the far bend, the back straight, and the final bend. Then I hear some ‘Monki’ from the crowds and I absolutely, totally and utterly lose it. I shout at the crowd and sprint – SPRINT properly, to the finish, passing three others in the home straight. I finish and a steward comes towards me. I kind of growl at him, and he backs away. Frankly. I could have run through a wall right then.

Then medals and bags and cups of tea. UP FLIGHTS OF STAIRS you sadists. And the lovely, lovely LOVELY No 8 comes over and gives me the big ‘well done’ for finishing 59 minutes slower than him. Ok, it was really to tell me off for looking too fresh. Ok. It was really to say well done. Because he’s lovely like that.

And then I give Listy a kiss, and we sit and grin a lot, watching others finish. I even forgive Hendo for cheating by using a proper metronome as opposed to my rubbish one. And I buy a neon top. Well, Listy buys one for me as I need a sit down. See lots of other Fetchies but don’t talk to many. Shout a lot. See a medal presentation for the first time (never finished in time before).

And then we slip away. Because we’re like that. And shout at more fetchies in the last mile. And laugh at the lunatic supporter with the bike and the stereo. Well, laugh with her – she’s happy enough. But perhaps she’s got more than tea in her flask. Kidding.

And I get home. And log on to Fetch. And old faces get in touch. And I realise that I’ve been waiting three years to meet McGoohan and Cliffy and I completely forgot. Arse! Cleavage!

A great day. An 11 minute PB. Oodles of affection all round. And now a big pie and chips and quite possibly some vino.

And more importantly, I learnt a lot today. A lot about preparation, about mental strength, about camaraderie, about shorts, about turns and quite simply about. I now have the motivation to really kick on and see what I can do with this running lark. It’s no good hiding behind the weight all the time. I can, and do, run. I just need to stop sabotaging myself. And wearing better fitting shorts.

Work.  Frustration.  Work.  Frustration.  Work.  Frustration.  Work.  Frustration.  Work.  Frustration.  Typing.  Not copying.  Not pasting.  Sick of it.

And I’m really too old for this feeling sorry for myself lark.  Larks.  Singing.  Spring.  Or Autumn as it happens.

SIgh.  Anyway.  No writing.  No excuses.  I’ve been given time and space to do it.  And I haven’t.  For the sake of a stylistic device.  Or more visually, because I stopped to look down while I was crossing the chasm.

And I’m watching adverts about bobbling and shrinking, because that’s how I deal with it.  PS As much as I would like to claim the credit, I didn’t write the no artificial colours jelly sweets thing ad, although my soul brother obviously did.  THE TRUMPETS.

Sigh.  It will be easier in the morning.  As The Hothouse Flowers once said.  Although they also said there was a black cat singing by a shadow of a gatepost or something.  Which is just nonsense.  No cat would sit in a shadow.  Greedy sun-sippers.

Having spent an hour or so on Saturday lying in the park, staring at clouds and refining plot details with Fliss, I am most disappointed to report that Tom has been left hanging on the telephone.

Literally. Metaphorically. Categorically. And probably stoically. Chapter 5 is in my head, but unfortunately a highly emotional and almost certainly re-draft-required scene needs to be written first.

And my head is full of snot. And my heart is full of misery. Well. Not full. There’s some blood and stuff as well. But mainly misery.

Normal (interesting choice of words) service will be resumed shortly.

Aha.  My nemesis.  I have returned.  The God of Onions is laid bare in all his phallacies.  Or something.  My wife has just returned from a night out to accuse me of being drunk in charge of a word processor.  As if!  As if the word processor does not have a mind, and even a vocabulary of its own.

Speaking of which.  I’m fairly sure Harper Collins don’t publish novels with the word ‘fuckbeans’ in them, so I may need to consult my thesaurus.  Or Roger Mellie.  One of the two.

it’s a hard knock life.  Ok.  It isn’t at all.  It’s a life made sweeter by alluding to it having something to do with onions.  Which as my nearest and dearest will testify, I detest.  Unless cut into small enough pieces.  And therein lies a lesson for all of us.

A bientot.  1,100 words tonight.  I blame the Prosecco for everything.  Except the onions.  The cheese was probably responsible for that.

And so, the merry dance begins again.  1,100 words today.  Mostly old, but some new.  But at least I like most of them.

In other news, I dreamt last night that I could remember the plot of No Country for Old Men, but instead I was dreaming some kind of survivalist horror with the Bardem character, and then remembering (in the dream) that I wasn’t dreaming the plot properly).  It involved wall-carpet covered rooms and assembling electrical equipment.  But fortunately I awoke before I was eaten / deaded / glasgow kissed.  Sweet.

Two very contrasting experiences this morning.  Two or three doors down there must have had an argument, because there were a series of messages written in coloured chalks on the pavement leading around the corner to the high street.  Part apology, part skit, part relationship warrant, it ended with a plea to meet in the park tonight.  If I were Richard Curtis I would have been one of a small crowd of neighbours who hid in the bushes tonight, wrestling the tops off flasks of tea, sharing kendal mint cake and gushing at the nature of modern romance.  In my version she’d kick him in the nuts.

I was curious.  A very male form of expression.  Even down to the correction of a typo.  Yet somehow saying more about him than about them.  I admired the neatness.  Of the writing, if not the execution.  I thought about photographing the messages, but for what?  To put on Flickr or Facebook?  To prove what?  I know nothing about their relationship – beyond what was written in chalk – an amuse bouche for commuters.  And as drama – well – how will I know how it ends?  Will they do me (and others) the courtesy of updating us tomorrow?

It also made me think of who could be absorbing the message, both literally – on their feet – and in their throughs on the way to work.  Of who they might bump into while they were reading the message.  What that might touch.  And getting pink chalk on this season’s must-have shoes.  To clarify, I don’t have this season’s must-have shoes, but then I don’t have any pink chalk either.

Around the corner I was walking behind the bag lady.  The one I usually see when I’m running at 6am – last time, chillingly, screaming ‘peekabo’ at the top of her voice (I assume she has tourette’s).  She has plastic bags tied around her feet – blue ones, matching, unlike most other things about her – her ankles are exposed and she has the swollen, puce, feet of someone who shouldn’t walk much, let alone spend their time shuffling up and down the road between London and Bath.  She was eagerly picking her way through some form of takeaway she had lifted from a bin.  I’m unhappy to admit that I felt revulsion.  Which bizarrely enough was probably more due to imagining the sensation of cold, sticky, sauce on my fingers than the recycling aspect.

Colleagues at work frequently gather to watch the food recyclers that gather outside our office at 4.20 each day, to claim the leftovers from EAT.  I find their continued curiosity a little distasteful.  But I watch them.  My ‘colleagues’.  I guess we’re all part of the human zoo.

I walk past several sets of shoes after I see her.  Designer shoes in the only ‘designer’ second-hand shop I’ve ever known.  In Fat Face and White Stuff.  Pointless shoes.  Charity shops that will help people hundreds of miles away from Peekabo Lady.

The last of my ground-level homilies today was an abandoned business card on the steps to the city-bound tube platform.  I admired the neat way it stood up on one edge.  I liked the sheer unlikeliness of it either being placed in that fashion or discarded while walking up the stairs.  I hoped it was serendipity and worried about the very fact I doubted it was chance.  Chance is rarely so artistic.  Art needs planning.  Like chalk on roads.  And plastic on feet.

My shoes need resoling.  They’re starting to fray.  It hurts to walk on the dimples in the pavement put there to help sight-impaired people to find road crossings.

All of which contributes to some ongoing musings on the nature of risk, and the innate conservatism of most  people.  To how you find crossings.  The chance of arriving at a crossing when the little man is green.  And the chance that people are forgiven.

As a result of comments made on Laurence’s blog, it is incumbent on me to share a first draft of some description. This makes me really uncomfortable. But anyway. My prompt (from Fliss) was the word ‘shoes’.
—

My name is Jed Nunson. I am a shoe salesman. I am a good shoe salesman. I have certificates and order books to prove it. I have sold shoes in half a dozen towns in this county, and I must have measured the feet of half the State.

I was taught the trade by my grandfather. He ran a small shoe shop, specialising in shoes for the working man. He charged more than Mellville’s, but he had a smooth manner and a loyal customer base. My mother and I moved in with him when father left to join the navy. It was only later I found out he had simply plain left – run away – not so much as taken a spare pair of laces.

Times were tough. Mother took to working in the shop, and I would help out with deliveries and general errand-running. My grandfather had a shoe-related tale for every lesson in life. I’d catch him drinking from a hipflask and he’d laugh at me and tell me he was polishing his tongue. You could always tell when he was closing a sale with the incomers working in the big new buildings in the town centre. He’d say ‘shoes maketh the man’, and smile and slap the other fellow on the back. He wasn’t always so polite afterwards, when they couldn’t make their payments on their hundred dollar shoes. I understand now.

He always made sure I had the best polished and fancily laced shoes at school. I guess he figured I was an advertisement or something for the shop. Other kids used to laugh at me, with my mirror-shine shoes and patchwork clothes. But I understood. Or I thought I did.
When I was old enough my grandfather gave me a book. It was about walking a mile in another man’s shoes. I took him at his word and traded my shoes with a boy from the other side of the tracks. My mother gave me a hell of a beating that day. But my grandfather understood. And he made me wear them shoes for a month until my feet bled.

I remember seeing my first pair of sneakers. Nate Edwards came in the store one dusty Saturday afternoon looking for some church shoes for his little Jimmy. Nate was wearing some Converse Hi-Tops. I’d only seen them on the TV before. My grandfather was horrified. He’d fitted Nate for black Oxfords ever since the man could walk – thirty years of one-pair-a-year custom going up in canvas and rubber.

That evening grandfather shouted and threw mother’s food all over the kitchen. He kept saying the world was coming to an end. ‘Grown men wearing children’s shoes’. And in a sense he was right. A bible salesman once tried to explain that you can’t spread the word of God in anything but Italian leather. I didn’t buy the bible, but he was right about the shoes.

I guess that’s when things started to go wrong. Less customers meant less shoes sold meant less shoes repaired meant less laces sold. Boxes of boot polish and little brush sets started piling up in the back room. And the place started to smell more of the whisky that grandfather kept under the counter. Mellville’s diversified, my grandfather didn’t.

I guess mother should have left then. Could have left then. She was still young enough to learn another trade. But she was still hoping one day my father would return and pick up the shoes he’d left at the end of the bed. And she liked mending things. When the work started drying up, she kinda disappeared into herself a little more.

I moved out on my 21st birthday. I took a job in another town up the highway in a Mellville’s franchise outlet. My first day was tough. My co-workers found my ways stuffy and threw shoe-horns at me when I told the customers they were wrong to but athletic footwear over american formal wear. But I learnt. And by the end of the month I was outselling the rest of the team combined.
That was 20 years ago now. I’ve sold a lot of shoes. Some good. Most of them bad. My grandfather passed on, and mother’s now in a home. I go to visit her and usually find her sewing. She’s not so unhappy. In grandfather’s will he left me his silver plated polishing set, which I keep in the car and use for impressing the important clients. They like the personal touch. Even if they’re only buying shoes.

I guess I’ll keep selling shoes till I die now. It’s in my blood. But people don’t respect you any more. They don’t care for craft or comfort. I wonder about this country. But most of all I wonder about their shoes.

While watching the death throes of the Murray vs Nadal tennis match yesterday I was left wondering about the former’s will to win. Both men are professional athletes, roughly the same age – they even trained together as chiddlers. Both are successful (or at least in pure cash terms both have won more than £1m in prize money), have impressive biceps and are blessed with a fair degree of natural talent. Yet there was only going to be one winner out there. The desire of one player seemed to crush the other almost before they stepped on the court. It’s not all that separates them, obviously, but it looked like it was a large part.

I can play a bit of tennis. But I’ve never practised for hours. Or worn a bandana. Or curtseyed to Princess Michael of Kent (not exactly a perk of the job). I simply don’t think I’ve ever wanted to _win_. Not in the way that Nadal does. I like to beat people, but these are usually specific people. I don’t play to win. I play to enjoy myself. Ultimately, this has meant that I have never trained in the way that he / Murray do or made the sacrifices that they have. Or benefit from the rewards.

Which led to me thinking about my ‘malaise’ in general. As mentioned passim, an old English teacher has creative writing as down to three things – time and talent and tenacity? Do I really lack any of these? Or is it something simpler, more basic? Do I want to be creative? In the ‘winning things’ way – whether that’s a contract or a prize or whatever? Or do I simply want to play the odd knock-up game of serve-and-verb and not bother the scorers at the end of the day? And if not, why not?

I spend a lot of my working life using the phrase ‘the thing that really frustrates me is….’. And for all the window dressing in the world, it’s ultimately ‘me’. I have no reason to be doing what I’m doing. I have no reason to be saying ‘the thing that really frustrates me is….’. I have choices, thankfully. And the most obvious would be to use my linguistic dexterity for some nobler purpose than to amuse people on social networks with just how many units it can take to touch-type.

I’m a project-based professional. I’m a project-based person. I have the tenacity (not quite as good as He-Man, but I’m working on it). I’m perfectly capable of being a stubborn and contrary so-and-so until the project is finished (or more frequently until the finish line is in sight and then I lose interest). What I struggle to do, particularly in my creative work, is to build on these projects towards a bigger goal. (Whereas Nadal can evidently both focus on the milestones in a tournament (the individual matches) together with the overall ‘project’ of becoming #1 in the world. And Murray is perhaps better at the individual. )

I wonder how I can turn getting the novels out of my head into something like a series of manageable chunks, particularly when my ‘natural’ tendency is to introduce complexity, not reduce it. (Obviously my biggest natural tendency is to find ever-more-convoluted ways to whine about not writing, while in some form of tragic irony, writing).

Even my attempt to write a series of short stories has been sabotaged by my ‘natural’ desire to (a) cluster them around a theme; (b) share characters across stories and (c) put them into the Monk Quixote universe. But still, if you can’t stand around on the tube self-consciously attempting to not write like a dyslexic chimp in shiny purple ink in a very old moleskine.

Sigh. Anyhoo, long self-indulgent post (aren’t they all) pondering on how to get those word counts moving. No-one else will write this for me. And even if they did, it’s not the point.

Slowly, something stirs in the forest. Let us see whether it is an ant or a bear.