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.

The gym.

Good news. I got the results back from the doctor about my chest x-ray. There seem to be no problems with it. Big relief, that. I'm quite happy now.

Actually, I'm even happier than that. I've got a bit of a hormone buzz going on, though it's abating. I'm not sure which hormone it is. It's the one you get from exercise. I've not long got back from the gym, or fitness club or whatever it's called. And I'm hooked.

This is going to sound a bit trivial to a lot of people, or it would if a lot of people read it, but at the risk of sounding like a bit of an O'Hara I'm going to go on anyway. I've never been the keep-fit type. I always figured my 'job' of playing gigs, with the isometric exertion it entails, was keeping me fit-ish anyway. So I never really felt overly unfit. But I'm obviously not in the right kind and quality of shape to be doing any meaningful distance using my legs, as I've described on here before and I've been quite violently reminded of today.

Louise got me in on a one day pass thing, and I was immediately surprised at the size of the place. It's just a little bigger than I thought, which is daft because I was there at the start, trying to get people to join the club about 10 years ago, with 9-fingered Gary. (I sometimes wonder where he is now. Well, I wondered just then. I can't actually remember the last time it crossed my mind.)

The pool and sauna and steam room caught my interest, if only because the pool itself is not as small as I imagined, so you can have a perfectly worthwhile swim in it. I thought it would be one of those puddles you get in places where you don't really expect a pool to be, like a hotel or a fish and chip shop. And the steam room - I'd never actually been in one before. When I was in Doha about 15 years ago there was an old style sauna in the hotel, one of those ones where, just as you're on the verge of passing out, some evil bastard pops in and pours water on the coals and all the oxygen gets sucked out of the room and you're left breathing neat boiling water and the only thing that stops you from really passing out is the unachievable desire to punch whoever just did that up the throat. All you can do, though, is to flop like a knackered slinky down to the door, try fruitlessly to pull it open for a while till some other masochist helpfully enters, allowing you to pin-wheel loosely out into full view of everyone in and around the pool, gravely shake your head, gesture back towards the door in the manner of someone with roughage issues leaving an airplane toilet in front of a large queue, and flounce back to your locker, in tears.

Of course, you're advised to, in the absence of a dip-pool, take an excruciatingly cold shower, trying not to scream, and pat yourself dry, so as not to do something or other to your pores, before you get dressed and go and do something far less deranged. Which I did, and it was by far the most surprising experience in my life thus far.

At the 'club', though, you're presented with a much less vicious option. You can just get back in the pool. It's not the warmest pool in the world, but you're far less likely to blow your heart up or endure a brief but debilitating hallucination as a result of teleporting, naked, from Death Valley to the North Pole in under a second. It's actually very pleasant, and you feel a bit like James Bond, without the pain.

Before that, though, I did a bit of running on a treadmill. There's about 20 of them there and, apart from a woman who looked about 5 stone in weight but sounded like a horse going mental in a wardrobe, I was the only one running. I didn't feel completely safe as there were a few people hanging around slightly suspiciously, with little to occupy their minds other than some tv footage of Leona Lewis stroking her own face, in close up, and the imminent spectacle of me pressing the wrong button at 10 miles an hour and impaling myself on a volume control.

To start off, I selected some program or other that was supposed to be somewhat realistic in that it threw random inclines and changes in speed at me, like what you'd get if you were running around outside. I quickly aborted this, though, because I quickly began feeling a bit panicky about being at the mercy of something that, for all I knew, wanted not to help me but to hurt me. Just before I hit the off button the machine had started to incline bafflingly sharply, which I took to show that my suspicions had been correct. What kind of marathon has segments where you have to run up a really tall ladder?

Anyway, once I got it doing what I wanted it to do, I then set about trying to figure out the controls and readouts and stuff. They were so simple a four year old child could have sussed them instantly, but I didn't have a four year old child with me and couldn't make head or tail of them. 

Eventually it transpired that I was running in kilometres per hour rather than miles, which was a bit crushing, and that I was burning a bunch of calories. As no-one has any idea what a calorie is I didn't really pay much attention to this, which I'm hoping isn't deeply unwise. I'll probably wake up one day in January, connected to a drip, with some doctor telling me how lucky I am to be alive, considering I've only got 12 calories left in me.

I was having trouble converting kilometres to miles, what with a spaced-out assumption that, as 2.54 centimetres make an inch, therefore 2.54 kilometres make a mile, and so starting getting most discouraged. After a while I remembered it's something like one k to .6 of a mile and immediately felt much better. So I ran for 20 minutes and covered 3 km, which is close enough to 2 miles for me, making my average the magic 10-minute mile.

Of course, my exhilaration over this was tempered by the threat of sudden-onset decrepitude and feeling like I was breathing through a strange new hole in the top of my chest, but it's a start. Again. It won't take long for the pain to diminish and strike less early. All is cool.

So I'm definitely joining the gym. Anywhere that has a pool, steam room, sauna, treadmill etc for a pound a day can't really be sniffed at, especially in my case as I absolutely need it and I absolutely can't afford anything more.

Now tonight I'm playing in a place near Eastbourne. Brilliant. If I don't get stopped by the police for driving a car that sounds like a cross between Brian Blessed stubbing his toe in a huge tin stadium and God farting, I'll be overjoyed.

My knee, continued

So anyway, the upshot of it is that I'm now pretty concerned about my left knee. If it keeps doing this I'm going to find it pretty hard to train usefully - once a week isn't going to cut it. I'm going to try one of those bandage type things and see if that makes a difference. No idea where you get one though.

Another reason why I want to train harder is this: it makes me want to smoke less. As in the actual desire for a cigarette diminishes after I've been out on a run. Partly this is common sense in that the two don't go together and it's logical and rational to ease off on the thing that makes breathing more difficult at 7 or 8 miles an hour. More pleasingly, though, the buzz I get after a strenuous run, and all running is strenuous at the moment, takes the cigarette's place. I don't get the craving so much.

Add the rational to the physical and hey presto, I don't smoke. I want to give up now more than ever, and I need something to take its place. It's the perfect solution. So all I've got to do is keep it up. Easy peasy.

I think I might go out for a run tonight. I'm worried I might put myself out of action again, but I can't hang around and wait for it to get better - how would I know anyway?

My knee

I can't say I've been particularly fervid recently, when it comes to this blog. Various things cropped up and made it all a little harder than really-bloody-easy to actually do any training, which led to not actually doing any training, which in turn led to me feeling a little bit guilty and and clenched therefore not knowing what to write. 

I can only type the word 'soon' so many times before it becomes unattractive and offensive.

My daughter came to stay for a while, which made it hard for me to train (don't ask why, please), then Louise and I went to Greece for a week, which made it impossible. Then I had the absolute definition of man-flu for a week - hard to train, again. Basically, nearly a month had passed.

So last Wednesday I went out for a run with Suzy, who's a bit of a dab hand at using her feet, and did pretty well. Ran for about 3 miles, perhaps a bit less, with very few breathers, and belted the last bit home as if I was in Stockholm and after 26 miles I was still Roger Bannister. This last bit nearly killed me, but after a hot then freezing shower I felt brilliant and would have gone back out again, if you see what I mean.

Then my knee seized up. Really seized up. By the time I went to bed I could barely bend it, and Thursday night I woke up and found I was actually crying with the pain. I ended up on diazepam, codeine and ibuprofen for 72 hours - it finally felt a bit better on Saturday night. 

This has happened before and I blame it on the fall I had when I was a kid. I dropped 40-odd feet from a tree (not literally, of course - what would a 12 year old be doing up a tree with a load of feet?) - breaking a couple of bones in my back on the way down thanks to a sturdier branch than the one I'd been holding onto, then hitting the ground in such a way that I broke all sorts of other bones and tore all sorts of tendons and stuff, notably my left leg. Even more notably and more specifically my left knee. 

TBC