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I wasn’t sure that I’d make the Park Run this morning. I’d got in late and been woken up early and it looked like it was going to be a very hot morning, but Me1 was up for it and keen to show up Me2’s poor time from last week and so I found myself doing it anyway.
Ironically the hard work put in on the hills of Woolacombe by Me2 had only made Me1’s legs stronger. But the heat and the weariness held him back a little and he came in at exactly 27 minutes - about half a minute down on his PB, but about half a minute better than Me2’s PB and eight and a half minutes faster than Me2’s time for last week. So bragging rights still belonged to Me1. Even if Me2 protested that conditions had been against him. But it’s telling that Me1 still did better on the same course under similar weather conditions and managed to not lose an expensive bit of headphone equipment.
The contest is not over until they are both dead. I am still hopeful that one of them can crack the world record time of 25 minutes.
I then sleep-walked through the day where our commitments were never ending - first taking my daughter to her gym class (where at least I got some time to sit down and write up the podcast blurbs and catch up on my blog a bit), then back home to my kamikaze son who is still unable to stay still for one second and then on to a mini-village fete at the school. Our house remains deceptively chilly at all times and I was surprised to discover just how hot it was outside. I turned out to be the only man at the even wearing long trousers and wondered how weird the rest of them thought I was for my sartorial choices. Phoebe got to sit in a police car and play with the siren, as did every child in the village, which I think we could all have done without and then played a few games and won some tat. Ernie meanwhile wanted to explore the field, so I had to follow him, my dark trousers acting like a sun-magnet, my legs tired from running, the rest of my body tired from being really tired. And unable to properly enjoy the sunshine anyway, for fear that this unusual heat was a presage of the boiling cauldron that our earth is destined to become. Just wearing long trousers and pretending it’s not happening is not going to be enough.
And much as I would have loved to go to bed at 6pm, we also had a birthday party to go to, which might have been fine were it not in Tooting, which turned out to be 100 minutes drive away. So we ended up spending three hours in a car to spend about 90 minutes at a party. And as I am the non-drinker I was doing the driving. But to be fair it was worth it. And still counted as a holiday from the kids. And my sat nav took us on a tour of my past in London, coming in via Clapham Common and Balham where I lived throughout the 90s and bringing us back via Shepherd’s Bush. Much has changed in the 28 years since I moved to South London, thought Tooting (where I briefly lived when between flats and sleeping on a sofa at Stewart Lee’s flatshare) has stayed resolutely the same. A bit like Balham was when I moved there, but seemingly a little more resistant to gentrification. Or at least, retaining some of its original character and population whilst gentrifying more slowly.
I realised that it’s now 30 years since I left University and those first years in London were so full of fun and potential and tears and devastation that they still loom large in my life. But most of those people drinking beer in the summer evening sunshine on Clapham Common were not even born when me and my friends were doing the same thing back in 1992.
The electric car got us to south London and back, even with the air conditioning sporadically on and off, with half a tank of electricity left, but I wasn’t in bed until 11.30pm and pretty much passed out the minute my head hit the pillow. Exhausted from my current life and memories of my past life.
