Yes, I’d like to remind you, I’m running for President
– appreciate your vote, and here is an industrial love song.
Joe Walsh, Eagles – November 1980
We’re having an election here. On 5th May.
So much has happened since our last, in 2001.
And can eight years really have gone by, since John Prescott was dancing away the London small hours to the heady optimism of D-Ream’s ‘Things can only get better’ ?
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There are stars
In the southern sky
Southward as you go
There is moonlight
And moss in the trees
Down the Seven Bridges Road
Sometimes there’s a part of me
Has to turn from here and go
Running like a child from these warm stars
Down the Seven Bridges Road
Eagles – November 1980 (words and music by Steve Young)
A summer’s evening, in spring. It’s a rare gift, and too good to miss.
The late afternoon warmth is still brittle, the low sun still shining through bare trees and fragile blossom. The far edge of an April day.
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Posted in 2005, Guildford, music, Surrey and Sussex
If ever there’s a truth in life, it’s that you get just the same out as you put in.
Easily remembered, but easily forgotten, too. And at eight miles in the Bath Half Marathon, it was time to remember.
Anyone can make a mistake. It’s easy to do. But after five marathons and eight half marathons, perhaps you don’t expect to make mistakes in races. But you can make them just the same. And with five miles still to run, I was learning just how true that was.
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Brace ! Brace ! Brace ! Standby for ditching…..!
These are the words you never, ever want to hear, especially when you’re flying at low altitude above the North Sea. But they were real enough, and strapped firmly into my seat, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
It’d been a hell of a bad day already, to be frank. One problem after another. The whole morning spent dousing out a series of kerosene fires, and then that frightening traverse in breathing apparatus through a blackened and smoke-filled furnace to escape. Without even mentioning the exploding chip pan in the galley.
And now, after all of that, our helicopter was going down. Again.
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Posted in 2005, A1 - the best of roads of stone, geology, life and times
I’m sitting on old Guildford station
Got a ticket for my destination
How I wish I was
Homeward bound
I’m on a tour by rail you see
‘Cos tonight I’m out in the great City
And the day at work’s begun for me
This rock hound with a BlackBerry
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Posted in 2005, life and times, music, poetry
One of the great benefits of taking up running is that I rarely get ill. Touch wood.
In years of yore, winters were always long, drawn-out, snuffly affairs. I seemed to go from cold to cold. Handkerchiefs were in almost continual use, and it seemed like I was permanently tired. From October to April.
After taking up running, I still was permanently tired, of course, but at least there was good reason, and it was a different kind of tired. And most of the zillions of germs that knock around our offices and schools during the winter months decided I wasn’t worth meddling with. Not only was I fitter, and at times even perhaps slightly thinner, but I was also more resistant to the coughs and sneezes that serve as unwelcome bedfellows to many of us for throughout the darker half of the year.
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Posted in 2005, life and times, winter
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