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Two days into 2023 and I still haven’t been for a run, but I’ve done A LOT of dog walks and two of today’s three lasted over an hour each, so building up to things slowly and surely.
On my morning walk I listened to Matthew Perry’s autobiography, which is an interesting listen about what it’s like to become one of the most famous people in the world and the perils of addiction. He is very honest, but I am not sure how much I like him. Unsurprisingly he’s a bit wrapped up in himself and whilst perhaps finally gaining some understanding of himself is maybe still a little lost. I recognise a little bit of myself in him, though my story is very much a diluted version of his, where addiction to drugs is replaced with addiction to chocolate buttons and arguably my 90s television appearances were not quite as successful as his. I will attempt to get him on the book club regardless, but will obviously fail. So this book is more for fun than anything.
He puts his abandonment issues down to being made to take a flight alone when he was 5 years old, which is indeed a pretty harsh thing to do, but parenting was very different back in the 70s. Do I remember my siblings and I taking a coach together to see our grandparents without adult accompaniment? I don’t know if I do - it’s only the vaguest of memories and might be like when I saw a moon sized Saturn in the sky.
Even if it happened (which it didn’t), I wasn’t alone. And I think the flight, as traumatic as it was, represented the break up of his parents and his father leaving as much as anything. Even if my parents had put us all on a bus to Middlesbrough, which they probably didn’t, they did an impressive job overall. Becoming a parent makes you understand a bit more fully how tough it can be, though I certainly wouldn’t put Ernie on a plane on his own. For everyone else’s sake as much as his own.
Nor would I ship my kids off to boarding school. The abandonment issues associated with that are why the UK is in such a mess.
Interesting stuff anyway and a lesson, if you needed one, that fame does not provide you with answers. A lot of performers think that being famous will fill the holes in their lives, but it just digs new holes. And Perry’s medical issues and unlikely survival are the remarkable story. More than him snogging Gwyneth Paltrow in a cupboard.
In the afternoon we took the kids and dog out for a walk to explore a Hertfordshire ruin. We chanced across a chalk pit too which captured their imagination and they ran around looking for fossils. It was a trek with mild peril as we had to skirt the top of the pit (it would have taken some determination to fall into it) and cross a road where the cars speed by, but it was a satisfying jaunt. The ruin was behind a fence, but someone had knocked part of it down and so we went in to have a proper look. It’s from the 14th Century and was in partial use until the 18th and has recently had some restoration work done to stop it falling down completely and we looked for the different building techniques to try and date what was old and what was new. I found some tiles in the undergrowth with nail holes in them, from a roof long departed.
A nice tour through history from 90 million years ago to slightly more recently.
