Friday 1 January 2010

Escape from Castle Dalkeith Country Park










Work has not been as busy as usual but for some reason has been taking more out of me. Maybe its the knowledge that everyone else is off and partying and sleeping late or maybe its just the time of year and the lack of light really settling in but it has been an effort to drag my sorry bones out of bed and up the road to work.

Anyway, yesterday I finished up until Tuesday and was reluctant to make any plans at all feeling totally knackered and unable to plan. I sank a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and an after dinner port which was my concession to the party season and as Peter fell asleep in front of the telly at 11pm I chased him off to bed and did some stuff on the computer and was asleep myself by 11.30. Woke up to the windows rattling with the fireworks and then later on from time to time to what I ungenerously thought of as the idiots outside singing and shouting but never lost any serious sleep time to this. At 9.30 am it seemed the right thing to do to get up even though I still felt stunned (like a clubbed seal cub on the ice). After breakfast I felt ready for another nap and went back to bed for a while. In the meantime we'd made a loose arrangement to meet up with Scott and Amanda and get some form of running in. Despite my pitiful motivationless state I did actually want to get out running so after reading a short chapter in my Freud reader and appalling Peter by telling him about it.."What? What are you talking about? Thats a lot of rubbish." I got up and we arranged to meet A and S at Dalkeith for a 7 miler in Dalkeith Country Park.

Scott has a sore eye so was sporting cool Oakley yellow sunglasses. Amanda had her new running jacket on. Brighter and more yellow than the sun itself! We chatted for a little while as we warmed up and then I got hopelessly left behind and kept getting snippets of gossip but not the whole story. It was the hardest I'd had to run in a while and I had to make a continual effort which I thought grimly was good for me but oh it was HARD, although good to be able to get enough grip in the snow to work hard (the surfaces were mostly quite good, optimised by my Inov8 mudclaws which I am growing to love passionately), but definitely hard.

Scott dropped back out of sympathy and we had a conversation which started with my idea that the human race was at a crossroads where two quite different branches were going to emerge. (This is an old hat theory but revitalised it for the sake of debate.) There were going to be the people who order out and the delivery people. The ordering out people would have a functional finger and of course a mouth and big fat bellies and the delivery people would continue to have full working bodies. Scott said this reminded him of a cartoon that he'd seen where there were big fat people who floated around in space and people on the ground who had to feed them. This step into the surreal got me to thinking that the odd buildings in the woods at DCP actually reminded me of a computer game Wolfenstein that I played obsessively for a while. The sophisticated plot of which being that there are Nazis everywere and its absolutely fine, in fact essential, to shoot them all to pieces. There is a level where the countryside is in snow with high towers (similar to the one I'd just spotted to my left) dotted around the landscape which would have snipers in so you had to use the cover you had to sneak up benind them and take them out unawares. I told this to Scott and he got it immediately and pretty soon, in what in psychiatry would be called folie a deux, we were both spotting Nazi encampments in the woods and indeed fat people floating in space "We could shoot them with Nutella" Scott suggested. All this served to distract from the sheer effort I was putting in not to get dropped by my running peers. As I always go running in Dalkeith Country park with people who are faster than me, I am always working too hard to pay much attention to where I am so I have no idea where we went....although it was 8 miles not 7...
But the cup of tea afterwards was mighty fine.

Now its a delight to write nonsense on the computer in our work room, with the heater on and tomato soup, toast and peanut butter and a cup of tea recently scoffed. Happy New Year.

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