Marcothon goes to the museum

We are getting into increasingly complex levels of combining running with other sports in our attempt to keep running everyday. Today's melange de sportif consisted of cycling our bikes up to the bike fixing shop - leaving them there. (Boohoo). Then running across the Meadows to the Museum. Peter's got some project where you can blur things in the foreground and background of photos and then the things in the middle of the field look tiny. Search me. Why doesn't he just go a long way away from them or else just photograph tiny things? Anyway - he wanted to go to the museum and take pictures of the people on the ground floor from the 2nd floor balcony so I pottered around looking at busts of dead people and also Hanuman, the monkey god, a little god of wealth whose name I have forgotten (and I fear he has also forgotten mine) and a bewildering variety of other objects which seemed to bear no relation one to the other.

One particularly poignant bust was of a Hugh Miller, who, according to the plaque, was torn between his interest in fossils and geology on the one hand and his christian faith on the other and so committed suicide. Sad, I thought, but couldn't he just be creative about bridging the gaps, be a bit less literal about the bible, that kind of thing? As it turns out I've been googling him and Wikipedia has a quite different take on the same story, saying that Miller suffered from persecutory delusions and killed himself as he feared he might harm his family. Does whoever put the collection together in the museum have an axe to grind with Christianity? Perplexing.

I had an odd distrust of the public today, and we were a long way up with only a slim, 3 foot high barrier between us and the short flight down to the stone floor below. I kept a wary eye out to see who was sneaking up behind me. I was troubled, as I am at cliff-tops, by the feeling that I don't want to jump but I might jump thus doing the wrong thing irreversibly. It was a relief then when Peter stopped fannying around and we retreated down into the very bowels of the building where we spent too much money on coffee and cake.

Then it was out into the lowering darkness, the driving rain and the battering wind, a mile up the road and 2 miles back to make up another day's running.

Since the bikes are away getting fixed I am determined to grasp this opportunity to tidy up the hall which is a morass of filthy running shoes and cycling paraphernalia and not just sit around blogging and getting cold.