not chilled

First of November and I'm in a t-shirt, feeling the unseasonal heat. Outside, a confused ceanothus is putting out little blue flowers and some of the fruit trees, I swear, are budding. Oy veh, people. Do we mention the ten ton gorilla in the room or shall we just continue to pretend we don't have to change our Wicked Ways?

Make me good, lord, but not just yet. Let me just burn more carbon, eat the fruits of some thousands of airmiles and turn a blind eye to the slave labour that produced five pairs of socks for less than the cost of that lump of coal I'm about to throw on my home fire to keep it burning.

Cue the Carmina Burana in all its dramatic glory - as a soundtrack for my current mood, it's hard to beat.

So. I won't talk about the gorilla tonight. I won't mention the fact that I have a motheaten heap of warm sweaters, unworn for three years, waiting for the weather to turn cold. I won't speak about the possibility of going for a swim in the sea at the weekend, without courting frostbite. In November. I won't talk about the landslide currently blocking the road that rejoices in the name of Rest And Be Thankful but which should be renamed Can't Take Any More Precipitation So Am Turning Into A Mudslide In Protest.

Went back to the gym last week and revisited all that fun equipment designed for the express purpose of torturing one's flesh into some semblance of fittitude or full-on buffery. Not entirely sure that my flesh has got the message, given that it prefers to lie on benches groaning fitfully and revisiting every insult paid to its tender pillowyness. sudden and brutal rediscovery of stomach muscles was beyond painful. Every cough brought a squeak of dismay as newly awakened muscles shrieked in protest. The gym had been repainted, which was all a bit dazzling given that it was only six a.m. Why white? Why not a pleasant inside-of-eyelid maroon? Urrrgh.

Nothing much had changed. Everyone was the same shape they'd been when I left eight weeks ago. Some of them were more sun-tanned, some of them had recovered from injuries and were giving it big licks on the treadmill, some of them were pleasantly surprised to see me back again. It was every bit as soul-less and isolating an experience as it sounds. Just another place where I don't really fit in despite three years of trying to make conversation. Still, it gets results.

Went for my first longish run since my horrible foot injury in May. Michael and I went to Aberlady beach ( bird sanctuary, no dogs, no dog-poo but loads of birders/twitchers/ornithologists) and he walked very fast while I ran. and gasped. And sweated and heaved. A thousand deaths were died, including my i-pod which did its flaky lock-up nonsense, and since I had no breath for running, let alone looking down and futzing around with a bit of crap technology, I had to run for the first twenty minutes in silence. Yeeeeurggggghhh. I'm one of those pathetic runners that needs music or else I spend every second trying to bludgeon myself out of packing up and going home. Fun times. NOT. Then, miracle of miracles, the i-pod self-healed and suddenly there was thumpy music with big bass action and I was off in a cloud of kicked-up sand like the nasty bloke on those old Bullworker ads.

Phwoarrrrr. She lives. She runs. She whizzes past weird posses of twitchers stationed all along the beach with their bins and 'scopes hopefully not trained on Lesser Beetroot Wheezers, or Small Gasping Coldtits or that rare winter visitor to our shores, the Blissed-Out Earbud Waggler.