Janathon #5

So, this is something that I've been working on in my head, and during today's Janathon run I managed to piece it together. It's part of a much longer piece that I'm writing. The narrator is a girl who has gone to meet her sister in London.

--- Lyssa ---

On the tube, I get the chance to take a good look at my older sister. She’s skinnier than the last time I saw her. She looks dreamy and blissful, too. She’s wearing sandals, denim mini-skirt, and a baggy loose-knit jumper, bright pink, with just a black push-up bra underneath. She’s got this ridiculously cute hat, with a dog’s face on it, and little ears sticking out the top. Lyssa has been seeing Denny for a while now. That’s who we’re going to see, on the other side of London, south of the river and all that.

We get off at Brixton. Back streets and alleyways, and then she tells me we’re at his place. His flat is ex-local authority, ex-official inhabitants. Demolition notices are all over the walls, we have to squeeze through two fences to get in. Lyssa does it with such ease: me, I’ve snagged my jeans and got a little tear on my coat. I’m not happy. She cuts across the debris and litter and decaying furniture in what I guess must have been a communal courtyard. She hasn’t changed from when we were kids. She doesn’t walk: she glides and skips at the same time with undulating fluidity. Not for the first time in my life, I want to be just like her. They’ve turned the power off, so the lifts don’t work. Seventh floor. That’s fourteen flights of stairs. Twelve stairs per flight: that’s 168 stairs, assuming, of course, that each flight has the same amount of stairs. The stairwell stinks of piss, vomit, and rubbish bags. There are coke cans and takeaway cartons and cigarette butts and black spoons and sludge, and vile black sludge. I’m feeling sick so I look up at my sister, climbing the stairs ahead of me as easily as if she was going down them, none of my huffing and trudging. At the seventh floor, we go through the door onto Denny’s walkway. There were twelve steps on each flight.

Denny is outside his flat. He’s smoking a roll-up, leaning on the balustrade, surveying the sprawl of Brixton towards Battersea Power Station, and the Thames. It’s quite a view. His shirt is undone, there’s a deep red stain on his combats, and yeah, fuck yeah, I can see what she sees in him.

---

Janathon activity: running 5km

Minutes I knocked off my Year’s Best time: 3

Fruitilution: Tangerine

Janathon #4

Fridays and exercise do not compute.

I walked a mile. I walked more than a mile, but I walked one whole mile with intent.

The intent, the incentive, was to get home. Half the walk was to catch a bus to catch another bus, and then the other half was to get home, warm.

I finished work at 9pm. I got home at 10.20pm. I’m back there at 9 tomorrow morning.

Home is where the heart is, where it lives: home is the ribcage to my existence, and it’s not the actual ‘work’ that I resent as much as the being away from my family. I mean, when they are as cute as this, who would want to be away all day?

I nicked the photo from my wife's blog. She’s doing a less frenetic Janathon. Her name is Beth...

Janathon activity: walked a mile.
Time spent at work: twice as long as yesterday.
New Year’s fruit: Does cucumber count? No? Oh, OK, apple again.

Janathon #3

My Shoes

I have owned – multi-blue suede Fila skate shoes, navy Vans that turned grey with age, kangaroo leather Adidas moulded stud football boots. Black DMs, blue DMs, steel toe-capped DMs and DM shoes to wear to school. Green Reebok basketball boots trainers, gold Nike Air cross-trainers and two pairs of Adidas Torsion tennis shoes in alternate colourways.

I wear my Converse everyday now. Blue low-top, blue low-top with double tongue, brown low-top also with double tongue, red low-top, Blue high-top, and Batman / Joker black/white/silver high-top. I also have a pair of Karrimor running shoes, and a pair of black leather shoes for funerals.

I would rather never have to wear shoes at all. I tried it one summer, in Scandinavia. I played football on gravel and danced on shingle and walked in the woods and went into town. The first day I relented was the day a four-inch rusty nail went through the sole of my Hi-Tec hi-tops and into my foot. I was rushed into a strange late-night Norwegian doctor’s office, jabbed with a tetanus booster and the puncture was treated. Within hours my foot had stopped throbbing, but my arm blistered and bubbled where the needle had punctured. And the midges and mossies came for trainers, blood-soaked as they were. But they were the only shoes I had with me, and I felt like that kid from Peanuts, Pig-Pen, as there I was, the boy with the flies swarming around his foot. 

My feet weren’t designed to wear shoes, and I’m not saying this like that Barefoot Doctor fella or a hippy (see blogposts passim) but as someone whose feet are simply the wrong size: too wide, too long, too high and too silly. Every pair of size 12 shoes I wear I burst through at the toe. Every pair of size 14 shoes I wear makes me walk like a clown. My running shoes are a size 13 and they are white and, according to my strict (although oft-broken) rules of fashion, no-one should ever wear white trainers unless they are taking part in sport. And even then, only at Wimbledon, or if you can’t afford running shoes that fit properly.

Janathon miles I walked: 1 (in my own shoes, not somebody else's.
New Year’s Fruitalution: Cranberries
Do I run everyday?: No.
Hours slept: Nowhere near enough.
Hours worked: Too many.

Janathon #2

After Roadrunner (not the cartoon)

Roadrunner once.
Roadrunner twice.
I’m in Love with Rock’n’roll... and I run every night.
iPod on I grind my knee cartilage and the broken soles of my feet into the pavement.
iPod on I justify having three sugars in my coffee and that slice of Rocky Road and a packet of crisps.
iPod on I run in the rain, through the mist.
iPod on I run through the new-build estate, between houses arranged haphazardly in cul-de-sacs, then down the only access road, up the hill, over the motorway bridge, over the headlights glaring.
iPod on I run past the RSPCA, round the tired and waterlogged park, past the farm, taking in the grim burning smell of the 3M factory and then back, across the motorway bridge, up the access road and I keep going past my house until the voice in my ear says: 5 kilometers.
I’ve got the power of the modern sound.
I’m going faster miles an hour.
Alright!

Janathon activity: Ran 5 km.
New Year’s Resolution:  I ate a Tangerine (yesterdays was an apple).
Apologies to Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers: 1
Long walks round IKEA beforehand with wife and 3 yr old and baby: 1, lasted several hours.
Dining room chairs bought, even though we don’t have a dining room: 2.