Category: Other thoughts

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Disco dancin’

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We all love new KIT, so yesterday, with its visit to Run, was a red letter day.  We also love Kurt and Fred (who was conspicuous by his absence!) because they’re just SO passionate about running and they want to pass that on to their customers. 

When you’re buying new trainers, they always want to see the old ones.  This is to see how the soles have worn so that they can recommend the most appropriate replacement.  They also get you to run up and down outside the shop to confirm their prognosis.  I was told to run off around the block twice to compare two different shoes: the equivalent replacement for my two-year old Saucony’s and a pair of Nike’s.  There was no contest, added to which the Saucony’s are a hoot… real discodiva strutyourstuff shoes!

The other item on the shopping list was a rain jacket.  Their stylish range of Rono gear is excellent and their new gore-tex jacket is a joy to wear… I half hoped for rain today so that I could christen it!  A new supersoft base layer t-shirt and a fab iQ beanie hat completed my acquisitions.  Kim went for two new top layers… a mid-season zipped top and a rain resistant jacket in red… it’s gorgeous and she won’t be missed when she’s wearing it!

We were so happy on leaving that I left my socks behind… any chance of posting them back Kurt?

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Middleton Common Farm

We’re really lucky to have a great little farm shop just outside town.  Middleton Common Farm is found on Middleton Common Lane, near Ditchling Common (postcode BN6 8SF, phone number 01273 890266) and they have a wide range of fresh fruit & veg, dairy products, cakes, other staple foods and greeting cards.  The reason we go there is for our logs though, to keep our wood burner happy and us toasty through the winter!

We started the wood burner going last week and although it’s now warmer again, there’s a sense of anticipation going to see the two brothers who own the farm and getting logs in for the next cold evenings.  What is charming is that after months of not going, they make us so welcome, asking to be updated on our lives and chatting like good friends.  Really lovely people!

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One-upmanship

My parents dropped in for a cup of tea this morning and we sat in brilliant sunshine on the micro-climate of my deck, fearful of moving too far in case the first bitter breeze of the autumn discovered us.

I was reminded of Iain Banks brilliant book The Crow Road and the famous line about his grandmother that hooks you expertly into the plot. All four of my grandparents lived into their late eighties and nineties and were cogent and active most of the way. One grandmother even fell down a perilous flight of stairs when in her eighties and broke her arm: the doctors warned that at her age it was probably shattered but were stunned when the x-ray showed a neat, clean break that went on to heal in under six weeks. Good genes.

This time last year, my mother, doing her bit for recycling, was busy flattening a milk carton, by rigorously jumping up and down on it (as you do?), when it tried to escape by running away. 

Alas, this left my mother suspended in thin air like an outwitted cartoon Tom.  The animators made the most of the scene as her downfall moments later was accompanied by a huge CRASH and a loud THUD!  In finest Tom & Jerry tradition it upset the nearby chair and table, my father, whose dinner landed robustly in his lap and my mother whose arm had, until then, managed to remain break-free for 77 years.  

Time is a great healer, but I have to confess that I was unable to suppress a childish snigger when my mother announced this morning that she had fallen out of the cupboard. 

Now I could leave it there and let your imagination play with this tidbit on its own, but I feel that I should add her own clarification, that she had slipped and had actually shot out of the cupboard backwards! 

I should also mention that the doorway through which she so gracefully sailed is eighteen inches above the floor… I can almost imagine Tom, Jerry and all of the animators jumping visibly at the THUD! when she hit the floor!

Suffice to say that resilience is in our genes and my mother, although slightly tender around the shoulder-blades, is undaunted by the experience.  I do hope that they’re not playing a game of one-upmanship though, exploding onto the pages of my blog with each new and more daring exploit!

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September gathering

Wow!  What can I say except that it was a great day: the sun shone, the beer was cold, the prams conquered, the chili was awesome, the Oyster Bay Sauvignon was a hit, no blood was spilled (although there were a couple of cracking bumps!)and the garden survived!  Although I’m really not quite sure how!

Notes: Children are happy to eat chili from bone china plates if you give them the opportunity.  In a contest of strength between an air freshener and a two tonne Mercedes, the latter is not inclined to yield.  Children of around two have a favourite game which is wanting to do whatever you don’t want them to do.  Also worth noting, they usually win that game. 

Overall feeling from day: good friends are priceless!

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Intolerant behaviour

Dai joined me for a really lovely run this morning, during which we apparently talked a load of rubbish… I thought it was quite a profound conversation but Dai is an intellectual so it probably just sounded like idle chitchat to him. 

We pretty much duplicated my run from last week, but the superior technology of his Garmen confirmed that it was 7.26 miles in 1 hour 10 minutes and that our best pace was 5 minutes 57 seconds per mile… which can only have been the ten yard sprint down the hill at the end, otherwise the run would only have taken us 43 minutes!  Statistics huh?! 

Although the Garmen is pretty advanced, I would be interested to pit it against Kim at some point, who runs at exactly 6 miles an hour.  She doesn’t come in a shock resistant case, but she has many more appealing features (many!), particularly as you don’t have to carry her around on your wrist.  Alas, she doesn’t much care for idle chitchat so runs on her own, which makes it more difficult to gauge distances. 

Which is why I have to make uneducated guesses as to the distances I’m running and how long it’s likely to take.  Dai was surprisingly intolerant of this approach to estimation… as an educationalist and teacher of CDT he is used to working within very fine tolerances indeed.  Give or take four miles did not impress him at all.  Oh no sir!

Breakfast did though!  Daren introduced me to Mooch76 and it’s fair to say that I have been more impressed with each of my, um, three visits now.  Part of the reason is professional admiration, as this little cafe-bar encompasses many of the aspects of customer focus and service that I hold dear.  The rest just has to do with the great standard of the food and the deliciousness of the coffee!  Dai had the small, healthy option (aka big bertha breakfast), I had the ultra healthy option (small bertha’) and Kim the vegetarian delight (wails ‘they didn’t give me any bacon’)  Duh!

Tenuous segway to short verse that I particularly like from Roger McGough which goes something like this (apologies, Roger, if it’s not quite right!)

‘There are fascists in the park pretending to be humanitarians, like cannibals on a health kick eating only vegetarians.’

Veggie steak, anyone, or do you have a fool intolerance?

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Of genes and pools

I am reassured by the youthfulness and spirit of adventure (resilience?) present in the gene pool to which I belong.

Last week I was talking to my Aunt who informed me that she goes out walking with her various positive-minded friends six days every week.  Furthermore, in order to keep in shape, she skips every night as she has done for years and eschews drugs of any form, preferring to let her body deal with illnesses on its own.  She is 79 years old.

My father has a most amazing garden which is gracefully banked down into the valley behind their house and stocked with all manner of exotic plant species.  Towards the bottom there is a pond where my older siblings famously experimented to see if their baby brother would float.  Thanks guys.  It sits on the edge of a small lawn and has a bank, rich with flora, rising steeply behind it.

Amongst other things, the job of garden steward involves tending both the pond and the bank behind and my father accomplishes this, from time to time, by laying a plank over the water and walking across.  Now, it is fair to say that he no longer has the reflexes of a cat, but he refuses to let this prevent him from doing what he loves.

So picture this, if you will.  He was slinging a net across the pond to catch the autumn leaves.  He had one foot on the plank and one foot against the far bank and he was holding onto a small shrub for support… when he caught his foot in the net. 

The shrub decided to jettison its branch under the the pressure exerted and my father looped backwards into thin air, presumably still holding the newly detached bough aloft next to a speech bubble exclaiming ‘crikey!’ 

In my imagination he whooped with laughter and performed a perfect back flip and two round hitches before diving into the pond… indeed, most of that must be true as he did indeed land backwards with a splash! 

I’m guessing that as an accomplished gardener and having wet the, er… cutting?… in his hand, he then planted it somewhere before going off in search of dry clothes.  And sympathy, aka a cup of tea, as I’m sure my mother would have just howled with laughter!

Safe to report that, at 82, he is still resilient enough to have been back out completing the job once dry clothes and tea had been administered.  Which is my point entirely… I really have chosen a great gene pool!

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Summer running!

Summer seems to have finally arrived, in the nick of time for the Bank Holiday weekend and with a week to spare before September!  Lounging in the sun this morning at 10.30 I recognise that I have to up and out early tomorrow if I’m going to run without dying of dehydration or sun-stroke so I think a 7.30 wake-up call and an 8.00 departure.  I feel like a two-hour run to the top of the Downs and back, so if anyone fancies it, let me know.

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Dream scene

My friend and favourite contemporary artist Darren Coffield link is a man of amazing intellect and to hear him expose the influences behind one of his paintings is a rich invitation into the mind of a genius. I have two of his paintings and I intend to buy more when my finances allow, as he is clearly going to be one of the most influencial painters of our generation.  One of the two is the initial proof for a series about dreams and it’s painted on fine silk which you can see through.

On initial inspection it looks like a black circle surrounded by squiggles in black and dark grey, but as your mind assimilates what is there it becomes clear that it is words written over each other, black in one direction, grey at right angles, each floating over the other but legible if you focus.

The painting signifies the moment of waking, when you can remember snippets of a dream for a short time, conversations, contexts, landscapes. As the mind awakes fully, so the dream fades, becomes more elusive, evaporates.

I was taught how to catch dreams about fifteen years ago, unconsciously waking at the end, keeping your eyes closed, writing on a pad next to the bed in a jumbled scribble, before falling asleep again.

So this morning I was deep in dream. I’ve not seen my good friend Maurice ‘Tigger’ Dawes for some time, but he was there in my dream showing me the house at the end of his lane. Strangely it had a deep, square-cut hole across its whole front, about the size of an olymic swimming pool. Inside there was a shed and a brand new Land Rover. The latest design, much more sweeping lines and somewhat reminiscent of the cab of a truck from the back. I wondered whether this was the latest experiential marketing campaign – maybe the idea was to work out how to get the thing out under its own steam.

The house was initially a strange big tent under an enclosed scaffolding, but when as we pushed through the broken front door it morphed into a darkly lit, wood panelled interior. Moving through we entered a room that had a seating gallery and there, seated all around, were fifty or sixty people. Maurice said that he had always wanted to perform a play there that had yet to be written, and spoke the first two lines.  These escape me now but the crowd applauded.

Then I was walking along outside again, passing a group of youths sitting on the other side of the road, each holding a big stick. As I watched so the nearest youth arose and started running towards me, as if to continue a game of ‘it’. I ran away and glancing over my shoulder was pleased to see I was quicker than he. Slowing down, I picked up a large, flat stick and conversing amicably with him, I showed him how to ride it like a snowboard.

With this change of balance, I awoke.

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Visualisation

It’s raining as I look out from the window of my study and while this means that I don’t have to worry about watering the garden this evening, it might make for a wet run in the morning.  If I start thinking now about waking at eight to the clear sky of a Sunday morning and leaping out of bed with the irrepressable urge to get out in my trainers, I reckon that is what will happen.  Focus is required, of course, but let’s see what happens!  Fourteen hours and 36 minutes to go.  Off to the flicks now to see The Bourne Ultimatum link so watch out for my review tomorrow!