People who complain

Rubbish, aren't they?

I'm being flippant, of course - the amount of complaining I've been doing on this blog is something I'm acutely aware of. Well, not complaining as such, more moaning. I'm pretty certain I haven't blamed anybody or anything but circumstance and my own decrepitude for the little problems I'm experiencing in my training. I could have, and should have, done a lot more over the years to keep myself in shape, and I'm paying for it now. It's not anybody else's doing.

The people who complain that I'm talking about, the rubbish ones, are that particular section of the public who throw up their arms in disgust and pious intolerance at what seems like the drop of a hat about things that either barely concern them or that they have no understanding of, but that they see as some kind of final straw, laid on the back of their particular put-upon donkey. Especially the ones who complain about other peoples' apparent undeserved good fortune.

The most obvious recent example of this foundless, jealousy-borne outrage is the pathetic hounding of Jonathan Ross, of course. (It turns out the word 'foundless' doesn't seem to exist. But I reckon it should. So.) Thousands of Daily Mail readers finding the most lazy outlet possible for their grievances - the mobile phone text or internet messageboard they are invited to contribute to in expression of their revulsion on a particular suggested hot topic - even without having heard/seen/read the transgression in question.

After the Andrew Sachs affair, and Ross's 3 month wage-free penance, there must have been (as Ross himself suggested) thousands of meretritious misery-magpies with pencils in one hand and the rewind button in the other, aurally squinting at every word out of the poor bloke's mouth, convinced he would very soon utter something unforgivable and then... Then they'd do what they knew they had to do, what they have been directed to do, and report him to Sir with much alacrity.

On his radio show he made a massively innocuous joke in response to his producer plainly extemporising on his experiences in his villa garden in Spain, to do with being 'grabbed' by an 80 year old woman in a frisky manner. Ross said this ""Eighty, oh God! I think you should, just for charity. Give her one last night, will you? One last night before the grave. Would it kill you?" 

Amazingly, no-one complained. They hadn't been told to yet, of course. The News of the World naturally is setting about righting this. It won't be long. And most of the complaints will focus on the license fee and how 'they' are being forced to pay an outrageous salary to this talentless, puerile, salacious oik, and isn't that disgusting? Down with the BBC! Sack Ross! And then burn his house down! He's a murderer! He is public enemy number one!

Only he's not. There's millions of people who love him, and they're not just teenage boys. More people watch him and listen to him than watch and listen to 50% of all the other shows on the BBC put together. He's perhaps the most popular man on TV today. This may explain the revulsion. 30,000 people complained, simply by texting '666' or something to a number which hogged the front page of the Mail for a few days, knocking the oncoming recession and the troubles in the Middle East and all the other really shitty stuff onto those pages of a newspaper that you can't see unless you buy it and open it and look at it. It's a shame no other paper came up with an opposite campaign along the lines of "If you read this transcript of 2 grown men being silly and childish and think to yourself 'well, I never heard it in the first place and really it's not my business anyway and also I couldn't give a toss' please text SO WHAT? to blah blah". I'm thinking they'd have got a lot more than 30,000 responses - as long as people could be bothered over something so trivial.

Anyway, I've wound myself up now, and I've been typing for ages.

I went for a 3 mile run Friday and it nearly killed me. It didn't though. Things are looking up.

(I've got new running shoes, by the way. And they're brilliant. Very shiny, too. I hope it doesn't rain too much over the next few months, I'd hate to get them dirty.)

Muscles, Obama and things like that.

I've been a bit lax again with regards to this blog. One of the main reasons is that I haven't been able to do any training cos of my chest/shoulder/whatever the hell it is.

I went in last week and saw Scott for an hour and he gave me some new excercises that would hopefully antagonise my chest area less than the previous. Oddly I immediately felt a little better. Maybe I just needed to get some hormones flowing or something. I still couldn't run though as I've left my stupid running shoes in Aarhus and I can't afford new ones just now.. bad time to go broke.

Still, I had an appointment with the physio today, which was interesting. It's one of the few sessions that I wish could last longer. Half an hour just isn't enough. It's not that it's particularly comfortable or relaxing, but there's not a lot of things more satisfying that having someone who knows what they're doing moving your muscles around and going "Oooh.." quite a lot - not only because you feel vindicated after months of moaning and being met with looks that say "Oh come on, it's not that bad."

Claire Tricks, as she is brilliantly named, was quite surprised at how knackered the area in question is. She thinks I may have torn a muscle round there, and sympathised heavily. There were a couple of moments where I thought I might cry, kind of, one particular prod causing me to swear quite loudly in a voice that could been that of a 6 year old who works on a building site. She's taped my shoulder up - I have to leave the tape on for 3 or 4 days - and is hoping that'll help but thinks I may need an MRI to check it out properly.

So it's not a heart attack anyway, which is nice. And it actually is getting less painful, which means I'm taking less painkiller, which means I'm not feeling so dark and down all the time, which is even nicer.

On the down side I can't swim for a bit, or at least not anything strenuous, which is not so nice. But I can get back into the other training, especially once I get my shoes situation sorted out.

Anyway, Barack Obama is due to be inaugurated at around 5 today, which I shall avidly be watching. It really could be the start of a new age of this cracked century. You get the feeling he really could lead the change that the world needs so desperately right now.

To be simplistic - it's been 8 long years of thick-headed, greed fuelled anti-peace and dread, and change can't come fast enough. It's a very exciting time, even despite all the lethargic and cynical qualities of the way we've found ourselves conducting our lives. In a world of shock, fear, desperate indignities and epidemic helplessness, it's possible something good may arise, and from a most unlikely place. At the risk of sounding patronising, if there's one brilliant upside to America's famous and infamous 'gung ho' reputation, it's that if this spirit is allied to rational, compassionate ideas, then maybe we could be seeing the beginning of a more benign juggernaut that, rather than blundering unstoppably into wars and other awful misjudgements, might instead bash a hole in all that and bring reason and compassion with it.

Well, anyway, I hope so. It's not too late yet.

Though it's geting that way for me. I have to get the last of the wallpaper in the hall and the bathroom down, so I'm off.

If anyone has £150,000 lying about and needs some investment advice, I've got a great idea.

Let me know what you think.

Hurdles.

It seems events continue to conspire against me. Having cheered up mightily about my knee, it's now my chest that's playing up.

That little sharp pain I mentioned before.. it's become nasty. Since I started doing some core fitness training, which I had a funny feeling was a bad idea, I've spent 50%, more or less, of my waking hours on either codeine, ibuprofen or diazepam. The words 'either' and 'or' could be replaced with 'and' for a lot of the time, actually. It really isn't nice. 

I went up the hospital to get it seen to, but there was a queue of about 4 hours, and the K and S waiting room is no place to be when you're in pain and christingly worried about your health. Mostly there were old people who didn't seem to have anything wrong with them except horror and disgust at the way the world is these days, which they were quite vocal about. Dotted around where slightly less old people who seemed, again, in perfectly reasonable health, in their cases the only evident malaise being just that - malaise. Probably not helped by being in a cancer-coloured waiting-room cum corridor filled with moany old pensioners. And there was a bloke wandering around in a gown, asbo bracelet round his ankle, looking like he'd lost his mum, or something.

Considering the fella on the phone (NHS Direct, one of the most savagely sarcastic names for a helpline anywhere) had told me I had to phone for an ambulance as soon as I mentioned heavy, sharp chest pains, I was a little perplexed that my condition had been deemed no more serious than that of any of these malingerers, and really quite pissed off about the whole waiting around thing, so I left. Consequently I haven't yet had any medical advice or attention. I'm not complaining about that - after all, I could have waited. But I could do with some.

So I haven't been training like I should have been. 

The christmas period didn't help, of course. Had things to do, you know.. However, and how's about this for sad, I missed New Year's Eve cos of this bloody pain! Unthinkable, I know. A massive great piss-up, one of the few nights of the year where being a drunk 39 year old lolling around in a bush and smoking more than one cigarette at once because you've miscounted how many people you are is kind of acceptable, and I ended up sitting on the sofa in a kind of L shape all evening, watching The Great Escape and drinking quite a bit of red wine. Every cloud, eh?

I've lost track, mostly because the Diazepam is kicking in now. I'm not actually sure if I've taken any, but that's what it does to you.

Dinner is imminent. I shall return.

Home #7

Duffy's a bit odd, isn't she? I've just found myself watching her doing a BBC session in somewhere called St Lukes. It looks like an old church, now that she mentioned the name of the place. she's wearing what appears to be an empty teabag with suitable holes cut out of it for her arms and legs. And her head, of course. She doesn't seem to have a philtrum, like Julia Roberts, and is about as Welsh as it may be possible to be. 

All of this renders her disarmingly natural, unexpectedly so from my jaundiced perspective. I was expecting someone a lot more showy. Even her dancing, to use entirely the wrong word, is charmingly clunky, which is rich coming from me. All in all I've rapidly started to become quite fond of her, in a relieved sort of way. She seems far too real to be successful in this day and age.

Unfortunately she sings like she's recently had a tracheotomy at the Helium Clinic. It's weird, because on the radio, I'm thinking of the song 'Warwick Avenue', her voice is much more sultry and husky. Like a 7 year old doing Lauren Bacall or Lee Marvin, maybe. A smoker's voice. I suppose if Penelope Pitstop smoked.. oh, I'll shut up about her now. Just felt compelled to mention it.

Talking of smoking - and I'll take a bow now for that effortless segue, if you don't mind - I've not precisely succeeded in my proposed quittage, I'm sorry to say. It's very hard, after all, and made harder when you're up till 7am every day in a Danish heavy-drinking milieu, but that's not a very good excuse, because there are no very good excuses.

So I'm a bit disappointed in myself. This is nothing new. 

However, time is wearing on - as usual - and, while it's still on my side, it's tapping its fingers on its coffee table and glancing at the clock. Why it would glance at the clock, except for the purposes of a rubbish metaphor, I don't know. It's 12.15 am, is my excuse.

So. Tomorrow I'm off to the running-shoe-shop. Then to the gym. I have to get back on track, as it were. I don't feel like I've ever been on the track in the first place, but I know I have felt that way only recently, and 'on track' is defined by feeling a certain way, so I'm sure I'll remember what I'm missing, and therefore be reassured by the missing of it. (This is a clumsy way of saying that I'll realise what progress I've made, however scant the progress may be, once I get back into the regime).

Christmas shopping. Oh dear. That'll have to be shoehorned into tomorrow somehow. I'm tempted to tell all of my potential giftees that my gift to them this year is my solemn pledge to do the best I can over the coming months to succeed next May and trust in their selfless, wise and thankful approbation, but I don't think I'll get away with it. Anyway, you can't wrap stuff like that up. You can wrap failure up, of course, in fact that's all you can do with it, but what kind of present is that?

It'll be fine. Small beans in the terrific chile of life. 

Right, Duffy's finished, I'm off to watch Survivors.

(PS: thanks for the comments. It's easy to say that feedback like that really means a lot to me when I'm writing this nonsense, but it's true. It's nice to know that it's not just me ranting into nowhere. Merry christmas to you, I really hope it's just one of many, many good ones to come :o)

Knees, part ohnonotthatagain.

I just posted that last one, hippily titled In A Danish Room (you're lucky - I was almost going to title it Thoughts From A Room Far Away), and I remembered something not particularly apropos the tone of it.

I went to the physiotherapist last week about my knees. It's not the first time I've stood in front of a lady wearing nothing but my pants (and hopefully not the last, ho ho), but it's still a slightly surreal experience, especially when you suddenly remember that the last time you took a stone to that bit of dry skin on your toe was, well, too long ago. But I'm very glad I went.

Evidently my knees themselves are fine. She didn't find any problems with the bones etc, and reckoned all the niggles and stuff will pretty much disappear with some focussed excercise and manipulation of the muscles around them and up to the lumbar area of my back. One leg, she deduced, is quite a bit stronger that the other - quite a popular condition resulting mainly from a slightly lop-sided gait - and I should concentrate on that while I'm excercising. Up to now I've been concentrating on not falling over or otherwise making a fool out of myself, but I'll give it a try.

So that's good, though it does make it harder to appeal for sympathy now. I've gone from "Considering how knackered my knees are from an old horrific accident while I was only a kid, it's really a very brave thing I'm doing, honest", to "Well yeah, my legs are mostly weak from inaction and wine-fuelled atrophy, but it still hurts...". Soon it'll be "Yes, my knees are fine, I have no reason to complain... alright I've stopped complaining... no, I know it's not really that big a deal... ok, I'll just shut up and get on with it, then."

Every cloud, eh? 

In a Danish room.

I'm in Aarhus. It's freezing outside and all is grey, which is what you'd expect in the North during December. 

Right this minute I'm in a bed normally reserved for the 7 year old son of an englishman who's found himself here indefinitely. His son stays on weekends so I've got the room till tomorrow afternoon. The fellow's name is Marcus and I'm very grateful to him. The alternatives are pretty awful.

I'm feeling a little down. This Tuesday gone Ollie's family and closest others organised a do at the Salomon's hall in TW to launch his last album, and I couldn't go 'cos I'm here. If I'd thought sensibly about it, though, I could have had words with the pub and got someone else to cover Tuesday night. I should have been there, if only for my own benefit. Mark and Martin did a couple of songs with Miranda, Ollie's sister, (possibly with Paul also - no-one's told me anything about it so I'm not sure), and I'd have liked to have been part of that, too. I think they were Ollie's songs.

I'm wondering how it went. Louise described some of it, said it was nice and a bit emotional. It all seems a long way away from here, though it's not as far as you might think.

(That just reminded me of something that's been puzzling me for years. Many people, over the time that I've been coming out to Aarhus, seem to be under the impression that this town, even the whole country, is in Holland. I've lost count of the times, not that I ever actually started to count them, that a perfectly familiar person has inquired 'how it went in Holland' when I return 

from Denmark. I often reply that we had this conversation last time and I haven't been to Holland in 15 years, but they'll still ask me again the next time. I guess the word 'Aarhus' sounds a bit Dutch, if you squint at it, but still..)

I haven't known a lot of dead people, I think. It's all relative, of course, and I suppose, when I think about it properly, there have been quite a few people that I've known have passed away. Neil Fuller, the Moonshots' old benefactor, was killed while out on his motorbike, back in another life, as was Ed from Newbury not much later - both lights blown for no tangible reason. Pattie from Newbury, too, though she saw it coming and fought it for years. More come to mind.

Yes, it takes little time to realise that the list of the missing is longer than at first glance, and a bit startling in a way. Maybe it's a character quirk, or maybe it's normal, but I feel a bit weird when I remember some of these people, almost guilty that I haven't said this or that name in who knows how long, or pictured a face or recounted a feat or a shared situation. Almost as if I've forgotten them.

Then again, you can't go round with all these people on the mind constantly, of course. You have to keep on and none of this will brush your teeth or buy your wine. But sometimes it persists. Sometimes it's so unnatural to think that someone's gone that you just kind of ignore the fact and look forward to the next time you're going to see them, though you have to forever put off actually pencilling it into your diary.

So, I find it easier to think of Ollie as simply not being around at the moment. I don't really think that, of course, this isn't a delusion. If you smack your head on a door frame or whatever, you may violently focus your attention on something else to try and ease the pain - to ignore it or hide it, obscure it behind something regular and less painful - it's a bit like that. Because if you keep stopping to think about it you'll do nothing but cry all day and then the memory becomes poisonous and the opposite of good for you. This works for a bit. When it starts to fail and the anger and grief start to swell again I find that banging my head hard against a couple of bottles of wine helps - though perhaps 'helps' isn't really the right word.

Anyway, I mustn't keep going on about this. It's still not really all that I feel on the subject, not even close, but I'm aware I could start boring you, if I haven't already.

So, running.

Not a lot going on there, I'm afraid. I mean - I'm training, doing my excercises, apparently getting my cardio-vascular up to snuff and all that. There's just nothing of any real interest to say about it.

Sorry.

I think if any time is the right time for a shower, it's now.

Membership.

I'm now a member of the gym. Fitness club, should I say. L and I went there today and I managed to get a pretty excellent deal out of the fella on the commission. Actually, he really did me a pretty huge favour - instead of £46 a month I'm paying just over £100 for five months, to be reviewed in May. I'm pretty pleased with myself for getting him down to that. It was handy having Louise there, too.

Anyway, I was reminded yet again how much I need this. I ran about 3k again, averaging about 6 miles an hour and, though I could have carried on, I was getting pretty shagged out. About the half-way mark I started seeing ripples and bobbles in the air around me so I walked for a minute, and then the chest pain kicked in again. Damn cigarettes... and the mysterious strained tendon or muscle or whatever it is. I should be seeing the physiotherapist soon, so hopefully that will cease to be so much of a problem.

While I was running I suddenly got quite a vivid image of Ollie, sat at his keyboard, grinning at me. It made me feel sad, it's still hard to think of him as gone for good, but in a strange way it kind of encouraged me. I can't really explain it, but I don't think I need to. You know what I mean. It kept me going, even over such a paltry distance - eventually the 3k thing will be easy and I'll be needing his encouragement after 5, 10, 20k. I don't think I'm ready yet to listen to his album while I'm running, I can barely sit all the way through it under any other circumstances,  but it's important to remember why I started this in the first place, and I don't want to let his memory down. It's all a bit melodramatic, I suppose, but I told you months ago that I might get like that, so there.

So tomorrow I'll be down there again, hopefully I can book an appointment with Scott, the marathon-man, and he can tell me how best to approach this silliness. Apparently he's about the same size as a cricket stump. Good running physique and all that. And then the pool and the steam room and the sauna etc. I'm already looking forward to it. Who'd have thought, eh?

Plus, my knees are fine.

The only slight down side is the fallout from this rank protein drink I bought while we were drawing up the contract. Seems it not only goes right through you but it brings half your intestines with it. I just tried to fart and narrowly avoided something quite horrible. So I shall take my leave now and see what transpires. Wish me luck.