Category Archives: A1 – the best of roads of stone

41. A Lincolnshire legend – Sir Isaac Newton

Posted on 27 February, 2004 by | 2 comments

sir-isaac-newton-woolsthorpe-lincolnshire.jpg
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night
God said “Let Newton be!”
And all was light.
Alexander Pope

A hundred miles north of the capital, the A1 London – Edinburgh road crosses a forgotten and largely empty swathe of farmland. Forgotten because today it’s on the way to somewhere, but at the centre of nowhere. And empty because of what happened here more than six centuries ago. The Black Death arrived suddenly in Lincolnshire, in September 1348, but, within a few weeks, a third of the population was dead, and this once prosperous and populated piece of agricultural England lay devastated.
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Posted in 2004, A1 - the best of roads of stone, heroes, history, science, the marathon journey

36. The Embankment, inspiration and reality

Posted on 24 January, 2004 by | Leave a comment

river-thames-panoramas-london-eye-millennium-bridge-and-st-pauls.jpgIf you drop a tennis ball into the Thames at Chiswick, the tidal nature of the river means that it will take three years to reach the sea, spending all that time coursing up and down The Tideway with the ebb and flow.

So says the display in the London Aquarium, where we’re spending a cold and draughty Saturday afternoon amongst the sharks and rays from waters far more tropical than those of the Thames outside.

It’s an interesting thought, this minutia of estuary dynamics, but one which vexed Victorian Londoners greatly, once condemning them to repeated reacquaintance with all of the effluent discharged into the river from the city.
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Posted in 2004, A1 - the best of roads of stone, history, London, the marathon journey

25. Ghana

Posted on 16 September, 2003 by | 7 comments

accra-ghana.jpgAfter squeezing in a slow ten-miler on Monday in preparation for next week’s Great North Run, I hailed a taxi to Heathrow and spent the remainder of the week in Ghana.

It was a fascinating and thought-provoking visit.

Memorable certainly for the speciality roadside coffin shop in Teshie, where they will make you up a sarcophagus in any shape you order, including lion, fish, eagle, elephant, aeroplane, outboard motor, or even beer bottle. And yes, running shoe can be arranged.

From there to Tema, ‘Planned City at the Centre of the World’, recently celebrating its Golden Jubilee in its setting just north of the Equator and astride the Greenwich Meridian.

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Posted in 2003, A1 - the best of roads of stone, Africa, life and times

23. The uncertain glory of an April day: Shakespeare Marathon 2003

Posted on 28 April, 2003 by | Leave a comment

“O, how this spring of love resembleth the uncertain glory of an April day” – Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 1, Sc. 3
holy-trinity-church-stratford-upon-avon.jpgPicture a fine and blustery English spring day in Stratford-upon- Avon. I’ve returned from Guildford to my home town for this weekend of processions marking the Shakespeare Birthday celebrations.

An East End boy, I moved to Warwickshire at the age of 9, and these streets I know so well are today lined with flags from over a hundred nations, flying briskly in the breeze.

“Now go we in content…” – As You Like It, Act 1, Sc. 3
Lining up outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in warm sunshine, reflecting on London and Chicago behind me, I am instantly humbled when my neighbour tells me this is his 126th marathon. Just the third for me and the day’s long road is frankly unimaginable at this moment, but soon we start and it all begins.
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Posted in 2003, A1 - the best of roads of stone, poetry, Shakespeare Country, the marathon journey

15. Sorrowful hills – the Space Shuttle Disaster and war clouds in Iraq

Posted on 3 February, 2003 by | Leave a comment

Dear Jonas
space-shuttle-disaster-and-iraq-war-clouds.jpgIt was amazing to read Ed’s account of thunder over the Texas plain on a blue Saturday morning.

Aspirations, beauty and death – these are thought-provoking counterpoints at a critical time in destiny.

It is truly my privilege to see such drama unfold through different eyes half a world away. To witness, and perhaps not to pass a view.

It’s just that as I run through a serene English winter’s afternoon, I wonder how will our two countries grieve the first seven victims of the forthcoming conflict ? And the next seven thousand, or seven hundred thousand ?
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Posted in 2003, A1 - the best of roads of stone, divided by an ocean, Iraq

5. La vida latina – from Houston to Mexico

Posted on 25 October, 2002 by | 4 comments

monterrey-gran-plaza.jpg

It was a stiff and increasingly hungry flight which I took from O’Hare that evening after the Chicago Marathon. Elation and relief surrounded me all across the dark expanses and sparse city lights of the Mid West, as I peered down through ten kilometres of space at a blue-lit arch of St Louis far below.

And after the sensory and emotional overload of experiencing, and even participating in, one of the greatest sporting events of the world set against the brilliantly-lit backdrop of a Chicago autumn skyline, it was an exhausted and fretfully REM-riven night which I spent in the softest and deepest pillows of the Westinn Houston Galleria.
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Posted in 2001-2002, A1 - the best of roads of stone, divided by an ocean, Houston, Mexico, the marathon journey