I haven’t written anything since the 8th of February. Well, that’s not quite true. I have written stuff, but it hasn’t been posted, and that’s because it hasn’t been any good. And it hasn’t been any good because it’s not been finished, and when things don’t get finished it’s usually a sign that they were never going to last the distance in the first place. By the time I got to early March I was starting to get anxious that I would never post anything ever again, but then by the start of April I realised that it really, really didn’t fucking matter. With everything else going on in the world, both the world in general and my own little world, it dawned on me that no-one would care less whether I ever uttered a single sound for the rest of time. And so, freed up from having to give a shit, I can now plonk out whatever I want, whenever I want, which was always the point in the first place.
I haven’t run in a long time either. The last time I graced the my local Park Run was the 1st of November. I thought it was later than that but I’ve just gone back and looked myself up. That’s almost seven months, which has taken me slightly by surprise. Seven months of not rolling out of bed at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning. Seven months of not checking my time and seven months of (usually) kicking myself for not running faster. Never mind, it was becoming an addiction anyway, and now it isn’t. If only all addictions were so easy to shake off. My heel is partly to blame. I must have pulled a muscle or a tendon but I never got round to finding out which one. If you look it up on the internet there is a very high chance that a robot doing big lines of AI in a nightclub toilet cubicle will end up telling you that having a painful heel means you’re three weeks away from inoperable cancer of the nipples, and if you phone the doctors to get an appointment you’ll be told you might just get an appointment in 2028 if you play your cards right (though you might also get fast-tracked if you turn up at the surgery and vomit up a kidney all over the nice lady behind the reception desk).
I can live without a Park Run addiction, but for me exercise is still very much a necessity when it comes to surviving the low, medium and high levels of stress that form part of modern life. It also helps me to not turn into someone for whom being simply morbidly obese is merely a happy memory; if I’m going to raise an eyebrow at a show on some niche American cable channel called ‘How The F*ck Am I Even Fatter Than My Mom?’ or binge watch a whole series of the overweight quiz show ‘Fact Hunt’, then it helps that I can still get into a pair of trousers that haven’t been made from an upcycled parachute. Sure, it’s partly vanity, but it’s also partly common sense – the drink and ciggies may catch up with me one of these days but for now at least I can still run faster than a cheese and bacon baguette and a bucket of Fanta.
And so to compensate for not running I have dedicated quite some time and effort remastering the stair master. I was good at it before, but now I have reached a peak that I fear I may never be able to top again. The stair master is very simple: you just get on and a treadmill of stairs start up and you just climb and climb and climb until you can manage no more or until you fill a whole hour, at which point the machine deliberately slows down in a subtle attempt to tell you to bugger off and do something else without hurting your feelings. In terms of calories it racks them up faster than any bit of kit in the gym, and what about in terms of sweat? Well, the stair master can find and dislodge moisture from your body that you didn’t even know existed: your eyelashes, your fingernails, your arsehole and your kneecaps. It can even make your teeth sweat. I managed to break my own record the other day and have even taken to snapping a shot of my finishing screen in case anyone dares to doubt the authenticity of my towering achievements; it is perhaps fitting that very few people are either interested or bother to ask. And when I say very few I mean the lowest possible quantity. Minus one.
But this morning I was encouraged enough to try to give running another go. As I write this the temperature is hitting 33+ degrees celsius outside, a sort of heat that I could have run in ten years ago, as a stupid challenge, but a heat that is tantamount to suicide in 2026. So I drifted off to my local recreational area just after 9.00am and after a brief stroll I managed to shuffle myself up into a light jog. There are worse places to run. Beirut, for instance. I have trees and lakes and armies of midges and brand new clutches of fluffy cygnets and a singular watchful, motionless heron and rough looking angling licence holders tailored by an army surplus store, smoking funny cigarettes – all right on my doorstep. If I’m honest I doubt I ran much more than a couple of kilometres, maybe three at best. Whenever my body instinctively started to up the pace my brain told it to do me a bloody favour, and so the only reason I kicked up any dust at all was simply because it was very dusty. This was less extreme sport and more an extremely poor show, but it was a run whichever way you looked at it and it made me sweat and, even better, my heel showed no signs of stress and offered me no sort of discomfort. Go, as they say, me.
Seven months without running and three months without writing. I must be going soft. Or maybe it’s because I’m closing in on 50 and firmly hoping that I am about to get to that near mythical time in life when you’re supposed to stop caring about almost everything. I know that I’ll never reach that point – if there’s something to worry about then believe me, that’s what I’ll be preoccupied with, but there is a sense of freedom in knowing that not running or writing, for what in retrospect is a speck of dust in the perpetual sandstorm of time, has made no difference to my life or anyone else’s. And I like that sense of freedom; it’s nice to know it’s out there somewhere, ready and waiting for me to join in. It’s also nice to have run and written again on the same day, just for the exercise. Neither were up to much, but at least I enjoyed them.
G B Burton. 25.05.2025
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 