I am stronger than a dead fish.
- Sunday, February 28, 2021
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The horizon is leaning forward.
- Sunday, December 27, 2020
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Hey Knobs this is dedicated to you
my Shamwari
and my Oak
the pebbles between my toes.
I haven't been able to write so I'm just going to let words fall on the screen, a waterfall of bouncing thoughts or game of pick up sticks, a higgledy piggledy and untidy jumble that will hopefully have some merit or sense or at the very least be mildly entertaining. I don't expect it to be great.
Life is strange and frustrating. there is always something falling, dropping or snagging. I dropped an empty wine glass yesterday, today I got my shirt caught on a door handle. Tomorrow I may block the drain with a sock. It is a roulette wheel of the random that we are never in control of, capricious and mischievous and occasionally laced with malicious intent.
It does have joyful moments, homecomings and smiles caught across the room, running and pausing by the pond to talk to the ducks and other interesting people, feeling the warp of warm, weathered planks under my arse and sending the girl with rainbows in her eyes photographs of my mud streaked legs through space, time and the internet. She just laughs and unplugs me.
I wish I was Clint Eastwood. I want a face that looks like it's been scrubbed by the ages and chiselled from rock. I want flinty are you feeling lucky punk eyes and a voice like a smouldering cigar. Mostly I want to stare down those twin imposters triumph and tragedy with equal measure because It's been a hellish year and it deserves a hellish response. It deserves no compromise and an honest look. It's contained more snags than smiles, more confusion and loss of hope than the balance that we are promised. It has been quite specific in it's maliciousness.
Life over the last 18 months has been a rollercoaster in hell. Terrifying and disorientating, any upward movement has only shifted the tones from dark to grey and allowed through the odd swirl of light and clarity whilst the wind, that doubting Thomas, cut ribbons across my face. I wonder when I went and how I got there. I became absent, slipping away into the deep recesses of my internal landscape where I was trapped and lost. Sleep became survival. The carefree days of running disappeared, that spiritual instinct of life wrapped in the cloak of physical exertion and natures healing embrace and was replaced by hard breathing, a sore body and unhappy grind.
I have examined myself naked in the Chernobyl half light of December, tracing my physical scars and burns and as yet unable to examine the invisible internal stains that I carry as heavy as rocks. Where did the voices in my head come from telling me to put ropes around my throat and drink on the roof? What happened to me and what has happened? I have no answer and very little detailed memory just the dark residues of mental health breakdown and all the pain, disorientation and loss that it brings with it.
Loss.
I'm not writing about Covid, that deserves it's own essay although it is the lens through which the last year must inevitably be framed. I lost myself regardless, it is not Covids fault and I suspect it would have happened anyway. I've mostly forgotten who I am and what the constituent parts of my personality are. Maya Angelou spoke of the horizon leaning forward offering space to place new steps of change and I am very much a believer in keeping the horizon before me, yet It is very hard to look forward when you lose sight of who you are, what you believe and what you dream.
I am healing but I may never be the same again.
Running remains. Running is the frame of my life, the exoskeleton that keeps me upright and breathes life into me. It is the tree in the distance, standing alone on the dusky horizon. The branches a filigree catching and holding the ochre light of the setting sun before letting it slip away, the sky becoming the colour of bruised plums, dark and purple and with a faint milky sheen of reflected light from the hidden heaven far beyond the grasp of human imagination.
Running opens the cracks in that heaven allowing the enlightenment that comes from stolen moments that are least expected or sought, the mind not striving for meaning and shut off from the distractions of normality. It is the unshackling of inhibition, the embrace of space, it is returning to my garden and my fourth child, the ruthless one sitting hunched over in the sun, with furrowed brow, whittling a long stick into a crude spear with the intention of spearing one of his brothers. It requires that I do not intervene.
I run to find my calm place in an anxious soul bewildered by anxious times. Normally I run long distances as a panacea, it is how I fly, the moment I drop away from myself and enter into a space that is still and harmonious with silence and where I am not inflamed and troubled. I do not want to be earthbound, unable to think, read or be, moving restlessly from room to room or falling into the sort of heavy oppressive sleep that leaves you just as tired when you wake up. Running allows me to love people as they pass by, ferociously engaged in their lives as if aware of the sands passing through the timer and prophetically as it turns out. It is living deliberately because we never know what this fickle life is going to deliver.
- Labels: Clint Eastwood , Depression , Ezekiel , Faith , Kipling , Maya Angelou , Mental health , Rainbows. , Rich Roll , Running , WB Yeats
This wonderful man with his Wongface and rubber wrist is a genius
- Sunday, February 23, 2020
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I am early, always early, waiting for the rest of my life and other interesting things. Some see this as a flaw but I love to observe and reflect. I also hate being late.
Saturdays rumble from London Victoria Station to Weatherspoons pub in Bromley, a run of around 15 miles was no different, I stood in the draughty doorway of the station concourse watching people going about their lives and trying to gain some clarity for my own.
Thursday was a bad day, my fickle bastard emotions betrayed me and I went down under their black weight, crushed again and functioning mechanically and without hope. I am having more good days but they are like a house of cards that collapse without warning.
I needed to run and I needed to run long.
I keep rising only to stumble back down, Sisyphus with his stone, rising and falling in endless futility.
Running is rising and so is genuine friendship.
I have digressed though.
Back to Saturday's rumble, We caught a standard London train on a windy morning into a grey London, posed for the obligatory photo and ran off towards home.
This is the one I find the most arresting
- Sunday, February 16, 2020
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It was huge, it was angry, it was drawing near
Behind his house, a secret place
Was the shadow of the demon he could never face
He built a wall of steel and flame
And men with guns, to keep it tame
(Bright Blue)
The mind of fantasists and the authors of cheap paperback novels
- Saturday, February 15, 2020
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There are spaces like brief flashes of light between the times I spend metaphorically rocking back and forth and gazing at a horizon that exists only in the mind of fantasists and the authors of cheap paperback novels that nobody ever reads. In these spaces I have been asking myself questions.
Twenty miles up, it’s a freezing cold universe, we only have the human connections we make here, nothing is permanent, and love is our only defense. I suggest we all vote accordingly, and try to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

- Labels: Annie , CASPA , Fourdaysrunning , grace , Ivor Reveley , Kurt Vonnegut , Sarah , Southern Cross , Zolani Mahola
I am weary with my empty sorrows.
- Saturday, November 30, 2019
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Many rivers to cross
I am wading through the flood planes of my emotional landscape, holding onto people with a singular desperation. When we wander through the maze with our bearings lost and disorientated by the lunatic noises in our souls and bouncing off the endless walls and the corners with their sharp edges we will do anything and grab onto whatever we can to save us. The smallest and most insignificant things become emotional life rafts that we cling to and construct ships of hope in our hearts to sail into safe harbours that are only ever illusions.
While I have been lost in this maze for eternity now, groping around in the gloom for the self destruct button I promised myself that there were places in my soul that I would never go, yet here I am, failed by my chemical band aids and my own inadequacy beginning to arrive at the banks of the Rubicon that I said I would never cross. I am weary with my empty sorrows.
When I woke up this morning my windows were filled by a thick and freezing fog. Visibility was poor and the trees were no more than dark suggestions in a vague future. They were ominous and the loom of their shapes held no promises of hope or redemption. I believe that this is what it is to arrive at the Rubicon, there is the terror of the unknowable dressed in a death shroud and there is a terrible form of excitement too that compels us forward even while our lizard brain is shrieking at us to flee. There is a Zulu word for this - Asijiki meaning no turning back. Once we take that first step into those waters swollen by the pain and emptiness of life we are committed. Our choices narrow down to just two options, swim across and find out what lies beyond the water and the mist or remain forever rooted in this place, the cold mud sucking at our ankles and trapped in prisons that we have made for ourselves often with the help of others. We fool ourselves that we are living but we are not.
Does this make sense?
I have tried Ubuntu, the African concept that states that we are who we are because of who we are together and I have tried to be a builder of humanity believing that the more we love the more we facilitate the reincarnation of creativity which is one of the great foundations of hope in the world. I twist words into circular shapes trying to persuade myself that this is the truth but I find that I have failed on all counts.
So the Rubicon is all that I have left and I am standing trembling upon it's bank peering forward although I know that I am blind.
Someone give me the light please or at least take my fucking hand. That is all it will take.
I've been thinking about the artist Vincent Van Gogh, that mad passionate genius. I think that he saw the birds held against the sky by a capricious god, their breasts pierced by the cold wind and made small by the woods full of riotous colour like paint slashed onto the canvas with brush strokes like scalpels. He saw the vast skies filled with the false light of dead stars in roiling circles and flowers dying in a vase as a metaphor.
I think it was all to much for him and he tried to communicate his distress and pain through his art. He found that the world was deaf so he sliced off his ear as a final plea toward heaven. Only the abyss answered back and I think the loneliness of that answer provided a perfect spark of clarity that pushed him over the edge.
I no longer have any answers either. I have tried to find them, fuck I've tried. Now I am empty, everything is empty. All I can do is hope that there is truth in the parable of the mustard seed or I find my own spark of clarity.
The kiss upon our lips simple with love, gracious and profound
- Saturday, November 09, 2019
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I recommend walking around naked in your living room
Swallow it down (what a jagged little pill)
It feels so good (swimming in your stomach)
Wait until the dust settles
You live you learn
You love you learn
You cry you learn
You lose you learn
You bleed you learn
You scream you learn
I remember a long run on the North Downs of Kent a few years ago, where the rain was biblical to the point where it was a dull roar and this combined with the howl of an unceasing wind was unnerving and disorientating. The base of the clouds descended to brush the fields and when I reached out to grasp them with pale and skeletal fingers they proved to be cold and void. Visibility was down to a few metres and the sunken trails were like streams. I was so devastated by the sheer and overwhelming sensory overload that I wanted to sit down in the mud and weep. I felt abandoned and alone.
It was a day where I had no clue where I was, where I was going or how I was going to get there.
That in a nutshell is how I feel about life now. I still don't have the answers, that blueprint seems to be lost to me.
A wise man once told me that all we need to lose each other is to diverge a single degree away from each other. After 10 metres we can still see each other, after 200 metres it gets harder and we have to shout. Soon we are lost to each other possibly forever.
Yet there is a glimmer for me, a subliminal flash of light that I need to interpret, the stub of a candle stood in a pool of its own hot wax and flickering a defiance into the dark. It is people who care.
I run, Sometimes to kill the snakes in my head, my skin sour with sweat and failure, my face itchy with a three day stubble and possessed with a dystopian soul. I run between the spaces of the passing hours, hollowed out, my life marked not by the clocks tick but by the sharp crack of the jagged little pills that I swallow daily, my chemical friends bouncing on the kitchen top and rolling beneath the microwave. I run over and over and over this ground, these trails and past the hollow tree because I believe this is all I have. It is the place that I come to play Jesus to the lepers in my head, the place I seek forgiveness and its gift of peace.
Yesterday I ran with a group of my colleagues, Annie and Kate, Guy and Andy. We were joined by Dan Thompson, CEO of The Gold Challenge. Dan is aiming to run in every country of the world by the 2020 Olympics promoting the benefits of a healthy lifestyle and fund raising for cancer research. He was visiting our school and was up for a run in the woods. It reinforced for me the value of running and human connection which I am still learning the art of. I have never been good at it and don't understood relationships, the complexity required to grow and maintain them overwhelms me. I am useless at nuance and interpretation.
I am making an effort now because time is short and I must act. Sometimes people come into your life with a brilliant light at an appropriate moment, becoming a radiant Gordian knot to be unraveled and discovered. They bring with them the sharp flare of hope and if they carry an unquenchable and consistent love the effect is mesmerising and powerful. These people are the well diggers, unblocking the wellsprings of your life, patiently wading through the muck with you and guiding you out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the fertile uplands. Often you discover that they also walk with a limp and the narcotic kiss of love becomes mutually beneficial.
These two things are my hope, to love and to run, through my archaic woods, mumbling nonsense to the cows, sheep and horses, being startled by squirrels and out staring the fox. I shall dangle my feet over the rivers swirl, meditate at the ponds edge and salute the dead tree hollowed by fire, the slow creep of moss and the soft feet of insects with sharp mandibles cracking against it. I shall pursue love and friendship in the hope that this is the path that will lead me to a place of healing.
I think you will find that I love you the most...
Give me hope. Give me friendship, give me love.
(duncan ditto)
💙
Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus?
To the lepers in your head
(U2)
- Labels: Annie , Dan Thompson , Depression , Dystopian , Guy , Kate , north downs , U2