It is seldom these days that you will catch me watching the news. I subscribe to the view of author Nassim Taleb, who says it is ‘full of noise’, in contrast for example to history, which is devoid of it. One example of this is what journalists do when there is no story to share… rather than saying nothing and going straight to the next programme, they share what they don’t know, or what they know didn’t happen.
Well, today I didn’t run. And like a journo, rather than stay silent and have you wonder where my post was this weekend, I’m going to tell you about the non-run.
After a busy week I entered the weekend pretty tired out and then had the kind of quiet, relaxing Saturday that you may have come to expect of me…
First I gave the 15-foot hedge at the back of the garden a manicure with a hedge-trimmer. Then I trimmed back my neighbour’s 20ft Philadelphus where it overhung the tea-house. Then I cleaned the baked-on residue of the Phily-flowers from the (normally see-through) tea-house-roof. Then I manicured the other neighbour’s 20ft Laurel where it overhung the fence, followed by trimming a couple of my more normal sized shrubs. Then I moved on to edge the lawns, then cut both them and the 1 metre-wide border of the green across the road that the council grass-cutter couldn’t be bothered to cut. One of my elderly neighbours said the guy had done a quarter of the job… harsh, but not far off! I bagged up all the cuttings from the aforementioned manicuring and… moved on to wash the cars. To be fair, that just about finished me off last night!
So this morning, whilst I might just have squeezed in a run before the sun broke through and the temperature soared, I decided to have a Sunday off for a change.
Except for having to clean Kim’s car again thanks to the sterling efforts of a seagull to cover it front to back! A little like a newspaper, it was black and white and read all over.