Sometimes the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.
Walking from Waterloo Station to the City of London, you can read this entire poem along the underpass.
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Back to the beginning.
The school playing field, on a Saturday, was a place I never knew. The only time I saw it, as substitute at hockey. we won 3-1, but the hockey coach refused to bring me on. I wasn’t picked again.
Now, thirty years later, I’m on the playing field again. I’ve picked up my number from the teachers in the gym, and ticked my name off on the list. And this time I’m ready, more or less.
There are a few of those long-nosed and lanky-legged running club runners you so often see in a local race – I can see them warming up around the track. But there are many more nervous housewives and out-of-training Dads, sipping anxiously on their water bottles. Revenge for a school career of sporting failures lies tantalisingly within my reach.
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Posted in 2007, Guildford, racing, Surrey and Sussex
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– Roads
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The wonder of geology, to me, is that it’s so much more than a study of inanimate rocks and stones. It’s a history of our planet, of life on Earth, and even of time itself.
The landscapes and seas around us, our climate, the plants and animals we depend upon to live, the resources we use whenever we go anywhere or make anything – geology is a route towards the understanding of all those things.
Every historian and foreign correspondent knows that in order truly to know the present and to predict the future, we have to understand the past.
And that is what geology gives us. Geology is a unifying discipline, which borrows so much from other science, and puts it all together to reveal the history of our planet and of life both past and present.
It’s so much of what we know about our world, and about ourselves as well.
But there’s a debate going on, right now, in the most developed country in the world, about whether any of it is true.
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Posted in 2007, divided by an ocean, environment, evolution, geology, science
The oldest regularly-held sporting event in the world reached its 153rd edition in London last Saturday, and I was lucky enough to watch the coverage along with millions all around the globe.
The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, from Putney to Mortlake.
Rowing – it’s a sport I know so little, which taught me so much of what I know.
Now I could tell you that sport is all about fitness. I could tell you that it’s about improvement, and dedication and companionship. I could relate the heightened mental acuity felt by the long distance runner, show you the slow-motion symmetry of a perfect iron shot towards the flag on a silent summer’s evening, or try to describe the sound of a mountainside half-shrouded in cloud.
Sport might really be about all of those things. But I know that’s not true.
It was rowing which taught me that lesson. It was the summer I spent doing this. The summer when I learnt that sport is all about fear.
It’s spring. The sun is out. The clocks have changed. And so have I.
I left my old job three weeks ago. It was time for change, and so for a few weeks my time’s my own. My days are brighter now, and I feel refreshed, revitalised and renewed.
The sun shone all the way into London. I stepped out of the train into an unfamiliar crystal haze as a cool spring day stretched all along the South Bank. The river walk was empty in the early morning, and yet through the silence I could hear the echo of running shoes on tarmac, all around me. I was only walking, but I could feel that exhilaration.
It took me just a quarter of an hour from Waterloo Station to reach my meeting at Tate Modern. Fifteen minutes to gaze across the Thames, at the city shining back at me across the water. Pale blue pastel sky above the distant dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, a vision of glinting white limestone pillars growing ever nearer.
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Posted in 2007, history, life and times, London, summer
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