Writing a book is harder than I had remembered. And I remembered it as being the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Before setting off to my cottage I had idly thought I might get 40,000 words done in the week and be a third to a half way through my work. But it doesn't really works like that. I have mainly been reworking the 6000 words that I had already written (having added another 1000 in the process) and realising that I don't quite know how I am going to progress after that. But I still think I've done a lot more than I would have done on a Saturday and Sunday at home.
I managed a run through the muddy countryside this morning. The frost and ice had all melted and the lake only shimmered as I passed it, no longer creaking like an old man's back.
Splodging through mud and sheep dung pellets, slip-sliding down steep inclines, twigs snapping back into my face as I dodged under trees: it reminded me overwhelmingly of school cross country sessions. That had come to mind yesterday as well, as it seemed we were often out running through the countryside around our school in all kinds of weather and those freezing cold days where the ground was hard under foot were the most tortuous and thus memorable. But the slip-slidy, twig-twanging ones were pretty bad as well. Never would you see more unhappy and disgruntled school children.
And yet... we all went out and ran in those conditions. Why didn't we rebel? Why didn't we just refuse and tell old Thomas or Preece or Haines to go fuck themselves? Because it was the early 1980s and kids had respect for their elders back then. And no guns. Now it would all be different.
But in fact I quite liked cross country because it was the only sport that I was really any good at. As I ran today I wondered if that was actually just because all the other kids hated it so much that they didn't bother trying, thus giving me the false impression that I was better than them. But if they'd really hated it then surely it was better to go fast and get out of the inclement conditions. I hated playing rugby, especially when the ground was cold and icy and you'd be tackled to the ground, scraping your skin on the hard, frozen ground. Even when the weather was OK rugby seemed a horrible discipline with its violence and homoerotic scrumming and slippy balls which bobbled out of your hands. I mean rugby balls obviously. Everyone always managed to keep tight hold of each other's testicles.
But with cross country, although I didn't like being cold and wet and splattered with mud, I enjoyed the feeling of being equal to the proper sporting bods in one physical endeavour. In the first year at Upper School I came (I think) seventh in the whole school (I was 13, but boys up to 18 were taking part) in the interhouse cross country race. I can see the look of surprise on the games teacher's face. How did this sporting dufus manage to do so well?
I don't really understand it either. I was pretty rubbish at almost everything else (though I did improve a little as I got older). I was born to run, that's all I can say.
As well as being reminded of my own Chariots of Fire moment (though I doubt they'd make a film about anyone coming seventh in anything) I also recalled the rumour that went round school that one of the games teachers used the break he was given when all his students were staggering around the Somerset countryside to go and have sex with one of the sixth form girls on a mattress hidden in some trees.
That sounds like it's made up doesn't it? Although I think the teacher involved in the rumour did end up marrying one of the students: it was Somerset, that kind of thing happened a lot and no one really batted an eyelid, plus he was a games teacher and that is pretty much part of their job description.
Whether he was actually so grubby to conduct his assignations so recklessly, in school time, on what one would imagine must be quite a damp and unhygienic mattress is another question. But the idea has clearly stuck in my mind, so it must have appealed to the 14 year old me (not to be with my games teacher on a mattress- but with a sixth form girl). Now I am a similar age to that games teacher I now obviously realise how disgraceful it would have been to have sex with a 17 year old girl who was a pupil at the school I was teaching at on a mattress. I would at least insist on doing her in my car.
Because I am a gentleman.
But the mattress thing obviously captured my teenage imagination, because a) I still remember it and b) I find something quite appealing about the grottiness of such a tawdry encounter. Though I have never had sex with anyone on a mattress in a wood - although I now remember when I was doing Camp America I did make out with one of the other counsellors on some mattresses under a slide (at night time - not when the kids were playing on them), which was technically in the woods, so maybe that is part of the association with al fresco, mattress based shenanighans.
But to be honest the effort of getting a mattress to the woods would be too much for me. It would be reliant on finding a mattress in some woods and then finding someone willing to have sex with me on the mattress. And surely a mattress in the woods that you hadn't put in the woods yourself was going to be a dangerous proposition. Why was it in the woods? Who had put it there? What vermin or germs or dead bodies were lurking inside it?
Having said that though. I am near the woods now and there is a mattress on my bed and Andrew Collings will be coming up in a couple of days.
Maybe my schoolboy fantasies will be played out at last.
And some people would argue that making young men do cross country runs is all about trying to make them forget about sex and to impede their desires. Well looks like they got that wrong.
