Warming Up

Back on MyFitnessPal (logging my food is the only way to make it work for me) and ended the day with 61 spare calories. I could have had a fruit pastille lolly. But I’d just had one. And two is a bit too much. A trip to the gym and a dog walk had given me 300 calories on top of my 1520 allowance. But day one is easy. Hopefully I am back on the health kick wagon. If last year taught me anything it was that I have to be as fit as possible to give myself a chance of being alive in the 2040s. I am not bothered about making the 2050s (especially given how hot it’s going to be by then), but would be happy with getting to my birthday in 2040 and then pegging out. It’s another 18 years of Warming Up, but at least that would mean I am halfway through writing this crap.

When I started this blog I was occasionally freaked out by realising I could remember things from 30 years ago, but I have now reached the point where I have memories that are half a century old and that’s a real mind fuck. If I think about that as I am trying to get to sleep it makes me feel disorientated and upset, but luckily I am so tired that I fall asleep anyway. If my memories are 50 years old then how old am I? I just checked. I am nearly 55. We moved to Loughborough when I was 4 and I have memories of Pocklington and a strong memory of the move (I had a whole box of jelly babies and couldn’t believe my luck, though in hindsight I realise that was a bribe to get me over the trauma).  Life is really whooshing past an alarming rate. Getting older is really strange and my brain refuses to acknowledge that it’s happening to me.

I finished Katherine Rundell’s excellent biography of John Donne today, ahead of recording a RHLSTP book club about it. I studied John Donne for A Level at a time when I was very sceptical about poetry, as it generally seemed artificial and fake to me (even though I wrote quite a lot of terrible sixth form poetry myself). But John Donne seemed honest, even when being sly and dishonest and most importantly was full of jokes that still worked (unlike most of Shakespeare’s) and I liked him a lot (at least the guy who wrote the sexy poems, I wasn’t so keen on the clergyman he became). In my twenties, when in a secret relationship with a woman who was pretending she wasn’t interested in me (to everyone else, though quite often to me too), she went out to work and I saw she had a John Donne book and left it open on her bed at the poem “The Good Morrow”. I don’t remember if it particularly impressed her, but it is pretty much on the borderline between romantic and weird, which when you think about it, most romantic gestures are. How they are perceived is how they are received. 

Anyway Rundell’s book is full of passion for the man and whilst acknowledging his flaws, correctly assesses his importance to English Literature and the English language and makes me realise I misjudged the sermonising older Donne too. It makes me want to read all of Donne’s stuff again (and the massive amount I didn’t study) and he’d be a great guest on the Book Club too. I wonder who his agent is.

Also he saw a ghost.