There is no magic left for Thirteenth Night. No more suspension of disbelief. The only magic possible is that we create between and for ourselves. Of course that’s true every day but it’s easier at some times of the year than others. All the special food has gone. There might be a handful of your least favourite chocolates lurking in the bottom of the box somewhere. I still have have half a panettone.
The Christmas bonomie has gone. Any hangover you give yourself for the next few months is entirely your own fault. Again, that much is true anyway but at Christmastime we have a kind of communal excuse for excess which dissolves after Epiphany. There is nobody to share your hangover with, nobody who will sympathise because we’re back in our little boxes until the warm weather comes back and we can have some summer picnics with bottles of fizzy things. We’re supposed now to live lives of continence and restraint.
In the old days, the best bits of the pig would have been consumed in the Christmas feast so in order to survive for the rest of the winter we couldn’t have continued to eat and drink like there was a continual glut. We’re luckier now, most of us, so abstinence is a choice rather than a necessity.
It’s strange that even in our very secular times we still depend on religion and spirituality to give our year a rhythm and pace. Our next big holiday is Easter, after all. We haven’t found an alternative in popular culture in spite of secularism and the presence of other religions. And the good news is that I’ve seen Creme Eggs in Tesco.
I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. Podcasts on history. Podcasts on science. Occasionally podcasts on politics. Podcasts on weird realities where nobody can pronounce Michigan. I can’t listen to the radio any more because the news makes me angry or sad or sad and angry. Is that sangry? You know, like hangry but you’ve already had your Weetabix and the European Research group are still being a bunch of cunts. So, I don’t listen to the radio but I still can spend seven hours a day in the car and I need something to pass the time while arseholes in Audis and seven year old Volvos try to kill me.
There is a point to this, I promise. It’s coming up now.
On today’s trip to the supermarket, I turned on the stereo in the car and the History Hit podcast started playing automatically and then it stopped because of something I had done or forgotten to do or because it was Saturday and something weird was going on with the moon. I have no idea why things happen sometimes. I am a constant victim of the quantum tech butterfly flapping its wings and sending out random, incomprehensible reset signals through the aether. So there was a sudden silence and Anne said “Well, we’re just going to have to talk now.”
Shock, horror.
Dan Snow was being interesting. His guest was being interesting. I was struggling to find something to say more engaging than “Cold, eh?” I am a man who knows are really tiny amount about quite a lot and a great deal about hardly anything. Were Dan Snow to run out of guests almost completely four times over and end up with me, we could just about talk for 20 minutes on the topics of minimalist running fads, Ford four-cylinder engines from 1977 to 1981, a small grumpy cat called Kick or trends in academic book publishing and how fucking awful it might get before, if ever, it gets any better.
None of these topics are fit for a ten minute journey to Waitrose. Not again anyway. Not so soon after the last time. That was awkward. Not something Dan Snow would try.
Like just in time manufacturing, just in time blogging is going to be completely fucked by a No Deal Brexit. All the things which will prevent Honda from getting widgets from Belgium into its Civics rolling down the line in Swindon will prevent me from getting a blog post out into the world every day. Basically, I’m using the real misery caused by inept politicians to draw a false equivalence between manufacturing and a cack-handed attempt to write a hundred well-judged words a day and put them on line.
I’ll give this a go anyway.
Just in time logistics needs everything to work just so. There can’t be any friction in supply chain or the production line grinds to a halt. Warehousing costs are minimised because Honda – for example – doesn’t keep stock of anything much on hand. They tell their suppliers to get what they need almost into the hands of the assembly line workers just as they reach for it. If that supplier is in Belgium and they in turn want to minimise costs so they don’t hold the things they make for long. Everything depends on keeping things moving on lorries, trains and ferries until they end up in a Civic in Swindon.
Just in time blogging needs everything to work just so. There can’t be any friction in the thought train or everything just grinds to a halt. Impacts are minimised because I – for example – can’t keep a thought in my head. I need to get it out of my brain, down my fingers, through the keyboard and onto the internet with as little pause as possible or I will miss my midnight deadline and lose my train of thought. Everything depends on not having things get in the way, like a lack of tea and biscuits, or too much work delaying the start of the process. This train of thought is more easily derailed than most.
That hurt. It hurt more than it should have and it wasn’t supposed to be pleasant. Eight reps of the Fulbourn Windmill Hill which is only really a hill because the rest of Cambridge is so flat. I overcooked it just as I did the last time I did this session and completed six reps including what Strava insists is a PB on one of the reps so I was putting in the effort. I wanted to complete the session so I didn’t hit my goal, in spite of the sector PB.
I could have jogged the final reps just to complete but that felt wrong. I could have swallowed my pride and not pushed quite so hard but that felt wrong too. I could even have just set off on the final reps just to see if I could hold the pace but I bottled it. I was unsure and I wasn’t prepared to hurt myself in a training session just to see if I had enough in the tank.
I have a weakness. There is a fear attached to training sessions now which won’t go away. It’s particularly strong at the track but it also hangs around road sessions now. I think it’s a bit like performance anxiety. It’s the antithesis of that rock up feeling I was talking about the other day.
Tomorrow is another day. A recovery run round Wandlebury and along the Roman Road in the morning should help shift the negative feelings and maybe I should try a few pacing exercises over the next few weeks.
If you want to do a spot of regular writing all you need to do, apparently, is sit down and write. It’s a lot like running in that respect, except you’re sitting down and you can’t be too liberal with commas. Not that there are many commas in running but there are times I come to a horrible full stop.
So just like getting my arse out the door for a run, I need to velcro it to the sofa for long enough to bang out a couple of hundred words or so a day and remember how my laptop works. This might occasionally become a blog about blogging. Or nose-picking. Quality is likely to be variable at best. I’m sorry about that. I’ve posted before that I usually write something once a week but seldom post it because it’s just nonsense. Now you’re going to get the nonsense. Whatever the blogging equivalent of opening your mouth and letting your belly rumble is, well that’s what you’re going to get but with a spellcheck run over it at least once.
How’s the hangover? I said how’s the hangover? 2018 was a bit of a shitter for lots of us and you might be carrying some of last year’s energy into this year along with the alcohol load your liver is clearing today. I’d like to make clear that I feel a little better about everything today than my biscuits do. My biscuits have been beaten up on the way to the plate, poor things.
We have passed that arbitrary moment time again and taking stock and making plans is more or less unavoidable. I’m using it as a cynical excuse for writing a few hundred words and getting at least a couple of dozen of you to read this nonsense. I’m no different from everyone else out there except I’m not trying to flog you anything. Not even biscuits.
For all the utter shite that landed on our heads and spilled onto our laps in 2018 – and there were Imperial fucktons of that, God knows – we had passing moments of joy. Sometimes it’s enough. It has to be enough; it’s all we have.
This is a bit bleak, even with the biscuits. It’s dreadful if your diet has already started and you can’t have biscuits. Me? I’ve eaten all the chocolate but there’s still the best part of an entire box of biscuits and a whole panettone in the kitchen. A whole very good panettone. And a bag of amaretti. And some of the biscuits Anne made in the week before Christmas. Were it not for the arbitrary moment in time this would just be an opportunity for a major diabetic crisis and not a character flaw.
I hope that 2019 is kind to us. It might be more practical to wish that we can be kinder to one another but there’s Brexit happening this year and that shit is awful. I’m going to have to remember that some of its proponents are human a few of them might have once had feelings too.
I’m getting it out of my system while I can.
Happy New Year, peeps. It could be considerably worse.
How are you getting on with your New Year resolutions? We’re 10 days into 2018 now and by now you should have been able to identify which of them are going to be straightforward and which are going to be more of a challenge. Some of the things you might want to achieve could involve overcoming a number of deeply ingrained habits.
Those things which are relatively easy to do are also easy to become habits. In terms of healthy habits you can probably train yourself to drink a glass of water every morning in about three weeks or eat a piece of fruit with your lunch in about six weeks. Anything more physical can take longer, even when you account for the amount of training you need to prepare your body for exercise.
In addition, anything more complex requiring the acquisition of new skills will take longer to become a habit. Suppose you wanted to spend an hour a day playing the piano and you don’t currently play the piano then you need to go through the whole learning how to play thing before you can have a go at bashing out a few bars of Beethoven or Bach before breakfast.
Establishing a habit is only the start. You have to maintain it. Doing a few press-ups two or three times in a couple of weeks is not a firm basis for a new exercise regime. Having said that, it’s precisely the sort of thing I do. I haven’t been for a swim or a bike ride yet this year. I have done 90 minutes of rather inelegant yoga and I might be able to get to another yoga class on Friday morning. That’s a start of sorts, depending on whether I actually get to Ashtanga.
The popular notion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something is a little simplistic but it has some value. I have had a lot more than 10,000 hours of lying in bed in the morning, farting around on Facebook and Twitter instead of getting my arse up and moving and going for a run or a swim or getting to my yoga class. I am an life-long expert in indolence.
Those 10,000 hours need to be deliberate practice, focused on improving performance at whatever task you’ve taken on. Going back to our putative pianist, he needs to realise that he’s going to have to spend time on scales and studies, learn how to read music and that’s not the easiest thing to do. There is a piano in the corner of the room I’m sitting in now and it spends most of the time as the resting place for books full of unused sheet music and a forlorn ukulele. At least Anne is ignoring the piano and I am only neglecting the ukulele. (I am neglecting to mention the guitar lurking down the side of the piano.)
These are both things that we acquired when we thought it would be fun to try things we last tried when we were much younger. Life gets in the way and in Anne’s case she was tangled up in her next writing project while I was tangled up in the sheets of my bed and distracted by social media. My expert performance is in displacement activities.
So, if your resolutions aren’t going well, you can always step back, examine them, consider whether they’re worthwhile, give them another go if they are, and change a few things to give yourself more chance to succeed. If New Year is just another day, then so is tomorrow and it’s just as good an opportunity to make a new start as 1st January.
A responsible person would tell people that there is a picture of creepy-crawlies further down the page. I know one of them is a scorpion and that will completely freak at least one person who would otherwise want to read this out.Â
I’m just about responsible enough to do this.Â
It’s New Year. Another arbitrary moment in time is approaching. The planet is swinging past that spot in its orbit of the sun it occupied twelve months ago and you’re standing there wondering what the actual fuck you’ve done with yourself since the last time we were here.
I’ve been thinking a bit again about what makes this time of year such a point of change for people. It goes beyond spending the next few weeks getting the date wrong. I don’t have a cheque book any more. Who does? But I remember the hassle of having to score out the date in the top right corner of the cheque nearly every time I used one in January, February and the first half of March. Score, score. Swear. Initial. New date.
I think now that it has something to do with trying to freeze time. I want to pin a moment down, like a beetle in museum display case. A bit like Haldane’s God, I have an inordinate fondness for beetles. Unlike a Victorian naturalist though, I prefer my beetles out there disposing of shit, wood, discarded body parts or other beetles and not actually euthanised in a jar of something unpleasant then tagged and labelled in a cabinet of curiosities.
However, more poetically, I do want to be able to examine moments from my year and display them for their educational properties. I want to take a scuttling “now” from the landscape of the entire stream of “thens” and label it. I think most of my moments, like most beetles, would pass unremarked.
For most people, most of our our lives pass like beetles scurrying in the dark. Our lives are unremarkable. There is nothing about us which warrants outside attention and that’s absolutely fine. I’m almost comfortable with the notion of being nobody at all wandering around on an insignificant speck in a meaninglessly infinite universe. I think that’s why I want to pull out those specimens which have added a flash of iridescence to what would otherwise be a constant stream of the commonplace wee beetles.
I haven’t been out for my long run today. It was such a lovely day too; unseasonably warm thanks to Hurricane Ophelia and little wind and no rain in spite of Hurricane Ophelia and still I didn’t go out for my long run. I do have an excuse though. Sort of. My right Achilles is a little twangy after my parkrun yesterday. I felt a wee stabby pain in the side of my foot on my cool down and the aforementioned twang started as I walked back to my car. I’d planned a run along the Roman Road this afternoon but decided to rest again because it just didn’t feel right but now I think it was an excuse to park my arse on the sofa and fart around Doing Things With Excel as I processed the results from this morning’s Cambourne 5k.
I think all athletes have excuses for when things go wrong. It’s usually best to be honest and own up to cock-ups. A period of self-reflection after a race or a training session is always a good thing and helps make the next one go better if you make the necessary changes. That is all well and good and worthy and necessary but it’s not very funny. (Nor is this, but I’m doing my best.) So with that in mind and because I feel the need here are the Top Five from Richard’s Big Book of Excuses.
In at Number 5 – The Wrong Kind of Weather.
You’ve trained for cool conditions and suddenly it’s twenty-five degrees centigrade. The sun is bouncing off the pavements just like the rain isn’t and the bastard spectators have all gone to have ice cream for breakfast. That black plastic bag you brought with you for warmth is mocking you. You want to put the fucking thing down but it keeps sticking to your hand. It. Won’t. Come. Off.
Or it’s pissing it down with rain and you have your favourite racing flats on, the really light ones with no tread whatsoever and the concrete surface you’re running on means that you’re suddenly Bambi on the iced-over pond. You want to run through the corners but you end up looking like Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? on a boys’ night out with Dick Emery and Larry Grayson: more mince than is seen anywhere outside of a butcher’s slab.
Which brings us somewhat tangentially to Number 4: I Really Needed My Trail Shoes.
Following on from the wrong sort of weather is the wrong sort of surface. You find out just after you arrive to register that it’s rained all night and that hard-packed trail you reccied last month now has the consistency, colour and smell of nervous cow poo. Your trail shoes are at home, still drying out because you fell off the river trail and into the actual river a couple of days ago.
Or you misread the race instructions, skipping over the bit about the bog at 11 miles into Race The Train and end up leaving both shoes in said bog. I did this and the marshal wanted to know why I went back for my shoes instead of just going on. They were my fucking shoes! I liked them. I wanted them and I needed them to run the last three miles of the race. I realise that marshals are volunteers and do great things from the goodness of their hearts but sometimes you just want to give someone a good hard nipple grip.
Number 3 is of course The Wheels Fell Off.
This is usually down to neglecting the Six Pees. Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. Actually none of the the excuses would be necessary if we paid closer attention to the Six Pees.
So you’re cruising along on a 10k at what feels like a strong but maintainable pace. Up comes a hill and everyone just runs away from you. Everyone. You’re left breathless and buggered by the scenery, retching into the gutter and begging passing strangers for a jelly baby. “Please give me a jelly baby. I just need one miserable sugar hit to get going again.” You have nothing left to give. You have emptied the tank too quickly, over-estimating your fitness and under-estimating the conditions. You feel miserable. You will never run again. You will go back to that bog in Wales and throw all your shoes into it. Of course, you are a complete drama queen.
Number 2: I Just Didn’t Get Enough Long Runs In
The excuse primarily of the lazy-arsed marathon runner who finds himself walking with seventeen miles still to go. Long runs are long. They are time-consuming. There are lots of things you would much rather do that may or may not involve alcohol, cake, sex, bragging on social media, cats, sofas or other soft furnishings, books, illuminated manuscripts, work (but only very occasionally), sex (again – how manly!), more alcohol, poor weather (see the above), twinges from assorted limbs and The Bad Back, and finally, rampant and terminal hypochondria. All of these get in the way of going for a long run so you can get to the start of a marathon having done quite a lot of fuck all and fretting but no actual running for more than about 90 minutes at all. That’s fine if you’ve done lots of marathons but the sort of person who needs this excuse hasn’t done lots of marathons. He’s made an awful lot of excuses.
The biggest and best excuse is Number 1: Injury And Illness Ruined My Life.
It’s entire possible to be both undertrained and over-injured. I am living, aching proof. In the last month I’ve had a week off because of man flu and the return of the twangy Achilles which plagued the start of my 2017 training. I’ve been as careful as possible about my training since March. I haven’t done too much, too quickly or too soon and I still ran a 90% effort at parkrun yesterday after a 32% warm up so now my Achilles tendons feel like one of John Cage’s prepared pianos.
On which happy note, I think I’ll leave you.
In spite of all of this, tomorrow is another day, the start of another week and maybe I’ll get through them all with no further recourse to the Big Book of Excuses. I doubt it though.
Sho, I have new denchuresh and I shound a lot more like Sean Connery than I did thish morning. Over the pasht few yearsh, I have been lozhing teethsh and becaushe I am a colosshal wimp I am shcared shitlessh of the dentisht. It’sh the pain, moshtly, and shome embarrashment. I wash afraid the dentisht was going to tell me off for not sheeing anyone for about a quarter of a shentury.
Well, I’ve sheen people in the pasht twenty-five yearsh, I jusht haven’t sheen a dentist. Okay, I might have sheen a dentisht. They haven’t been invizhible all theshe yearsh but I haven’t been shtrapped down into one of thoshe chairsh while a drill shreamsh and zhizhesh. And they really would have had to shtrap me in.
I’ve been sheeing a dentisht whozhe name – unfortunately – is Zhushanna. It’sh unfortunate becaushe now I have problemsh shaying my shibillantsh. Shame about the shibollethsh. She ish really good with what the practishe callsh “nervoush patientsh.” She wash very nishe when I firsht went into shee her with a mouth full of pain and no clear idea of how I wash going to get through the nexsht few minutesh without either shcreaming or passhing out.
Zhushanna and her colleaguesh have looked after me sho well I can now shit – shorry – remain in the waiting room for almosht five minutesh now without running out the door “for a breath of fresh air.” I definitely wasn’t going to throw up. Absholutely not.
Sho kidsh, look after your teethsh ash besht you can, eshpecially if you are sho afraid of going to the dentisht that the shight of a dentisht’s name plate can looshen your bowelsh. Me, I’m going to get ushed to these thingsh eventually. Apparently I can practishe shaying my esshes by shaying “shixshty-one, shixshty-two, shixshty-three” et shetera in front of a mirror. I’m off to try that now. Shee you later.
