Month: February 2010

What’s the matter here?

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the story of my worries of the week.

Saturday – watched a performance from Norwich City vs Southampton that was best described as turgid. Not helped by sitting next to the Southampton fans, who alternated their singing between ‘Top of the league, – You’re having a laugh’, ‘Small town near Ipswich, you’re just a small town near Ipswich’ and, as the home supporters started leaving at 2-0 down, ‘Home to your sister, you’re going home to your sister’. My main worries were around the value of forking out £56 to take two of the boys to a game of such embarrassing disappointment, and the huge wage bill that Norwich City pay to players who, largely, didn’t seem to be able to do their job properly.

Sunday – worried about Jr Emu #2 having a crap 14th birthday as he’d been throwing up all night and looked pretty miserable all day. Then I worried about the results of a long run, where I’d struggled to hit the time I wanted, and had a slight twinge in my right calf caused by my pesky compression sock, which then developed into not being able to put any weight on it (my leg, not the sock) for the rest of the day. So I worried about getting old, not being able to run marathons again, and generally being crap at what I wanted to do.

Monday – worried about work. Came home and worried that I wasn’t being a terribly good parent.

Tuesday – worried about dreadful customer service from Apple, a company I’d previously thought very highly of, and who now are pretty low on my list of favourite businesses. Pretty weird that Apple don’t even have a complaints process, and even weirder that they find it acceptable to charge £73 to fix an iPod that was still under warranty.

Wednesday – worried about work in the morning and afternoon. In the evening, worried about whether the new band was going to be tight enough to be gig-worthy, whether the songs were strong enough, whether the lyrics made sense, and whether I was getting a bit too old for this rock and roll lark.

Thursday – ran into work, listening to a podcast of ‘The Interview’ from BBC World Service. This was an interview with Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda. We all know about the appalling genocide in Rwanda, and Kagame is the man who has been tasked with rebuilding the country following that dreadful history. You can hear the podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004t5p8, and I thoroughly recommend that you do.

Whatever you might think about Kagame, his thoughts on class division and the work in having to rebuild communities where a devastated family might have to live next door to the perpetrators of the genocide and be encouraged to co-exist, are, frankly, mind-blowing.

So, largely, I decided that my worries were pretty small beer in the scheme of things. In fact, should I ever descend in this blog to the sort of whinging that doesn’t stand up to real world reality, please do remind me that I don’t even know I’m born.

I’m like a John Deere tractor…

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment


Here are two things that happened to me on a run this morning.

It was a reasonably early start, the temperature was about -3, and I wanted to get 20 miles in, ideally before the family had started missing me. For anyone who has met my family, you’ll realise that this is veering into the realms of self-aggrandisation; no member of my family admitted to missing me, has ever pleaded with me to stay at home rather than go out, and none of them has ever been in the least bit pleased to see me on my return from a run.

Anyway, it was really cold. If I’d not been reading Mark Beaumont’s excellent book about cycling around the world the night before, I would have started feeling a tad sorry for myself. If you get a chance to read this, do. Once you get past the rather graphic descriptions of open saddle sores, it’s an amazing account of self determination in the throes of a real physical test. And the bit I’d read the night before included him sleeping outside in sub-zero temperatures, and getting back on the bike just to keep from freezing, so a frosty run around the French countryside didn’t actually seem so bad.

I was in a vaguely grumpy mood, partly as I found my ipod had lost its charge again. Normally I’m accompanied by Simon Mayo, Sandi Toksveg or Danny Baker on these runs, but no luck this morning, so, I was going to have to do 2.5 hours alone with my thoughts. And again, as my family will testify, that’s a dangerous amount of time. If you spend that amount of time just thinking, you can a) solve the riddles of the world, or b) let your mind wander around in a random collection of vaguely connected and surreal thoughts. I tend to opt for the latter, not least as my normal long runs with my friend G are more constructive, generally trying to ease him from his lofty political position just to the right of Ghengis Khan, to something a little more liberal. Occasionally I get him just this side of Lord Tebbit, but then we get to the end of our run, and he reads another week’s worth of the Daily Mail and by the following Sunday we’re back to square one.

But I digress. There I was, alone with my thoughts, and two things happened.

Running along a frozen track, with fields either side, three deer ran across in front of me. Not for the first time in this situation, I wondered why on earth I ever bothered with this running lark. To see an animal as graceful as that, running across ploughed and frozen fields, and springing along just…well, naturally, was fantastic to see, but a bit of a contrast to the rather ambling shuffle that I was effecting. It did make me think for a while about human form – other than the absolute top athletes, do we ever look at each other (or ourselves, for that matter) in awe at our grace, or naturalness, when moving? Have a look at a really big event like the London Marathon, next time you see it – after (say) the first 100 finishers, who looks like they’re naturally running? Or better still, if you’re a runner, take your next run through a town centre and sneak a glance in the shop windows when you go past. That, ladies and gentlemen, is you, and it’s exactly why kids point and laugh at you.

So, this thought kept me going for a couple more miles, during which, of course, I tried, remarkably unsuccessfully, to adjust my form to that of a graceful and stylish athlete. And then the horror of the Smurfs struck. If you’re a runner, you may recognise this phenomenon. You’re rattling along, alone with your thoughts, and suddenly, you run out of thoughts, and a song comes into your head. And not just any song, often the most irritating song you’ve ever heard, and you just can’t shift it. Sometimes I give up on the ‘trying to shift it’ bit, and start singing it to myself. Which is why, for the last 4 miles of the 2004 London marathon, I ended up singing verse one of The Smurf Song. Constantly. And, I’m pretty sure, audibly. Fortunately for me, the song that came into my head this morning was slightly less painful. It was the first verse of The Judds’ “John Deere Tractor”. I first heard this in the mid-80’s and the sheer C&W-ness of the lyric has been a benchmark for me ever since, describing a country girl’s adventure into the big city leaving her alone, vulnerable, and fed up with not getting anywhere. Has anyone ever crammed so much good ol’ boy emotion into a metaphor?

I’m like a John Deere tractor in a half acre field

trying to plow a furrow where the soil is made of steel

Oh I wish I was home, where the bluegrass is growin’

and the sweet country boys don’t complain

And, as I went trough this verse for the umpteenth time, I looked to my left onto the field. Which was about half an acre. And frozen. And the John Deere tractor on it was definitely struggling with the plough.

Spooky, huh? Thanks goodness I’d lost the Smurf song by then, otherwise I really would be tripping…

Slower Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

Firstly, apologies for absence from the waves of t’interweb. I have no excuse other than being slightly busy, and a bit blind to new thoughts – what a horrible way to start the year! I do have a plan to fill such gaps in 2010 with a short series of memoirs of my life n Rock n Roll, such as it has been. But more of that another time.

Also, half-hearted apologies about the title…but all will make sense soon. If you’re not familiar with the work of Russ Meyer, here’s a synopsis from Wikipedia of ‘Faster Pussycat! Kill, Kill!”

“Three thrill-seeking go-go dancers encounter a young couple in the desert while drag racing. After killing the boyfriend with her bare hands, Varla drugs, binds, gags and kidnaps his girlfriend, Linda. On a desolate highway, the four stop at a gas station, where they see an old man and his muscular, dimwitted son, known as the Vegetable. The gas station attendant tells the women that the old man and his two sons live on a decrepit ranch with a hidden cache of money. Intrigued, Varla hatches a scheme to rob the lecherous old man, who is confined to a wheelchair.”

Go on, rent it. Better still, have a weekend ‘in the style of’. Actually don’t, but it does sound like the sort of thing that we might have aspired to a few years back.

Several years (and a number of children) ago, Mrs Emu and I, together with Mrs Emu’s younger brother, took a convertible hire car from LA to Vegas ‘in the style of’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And a very wonderful time we had as well, at least partly re-enacting the book. For some reason, myself and ME’sYB necked a bottle of tequila and Mr & Mrs T’s Marguerita Mix in the back of the car, accompanying ourselves as Mrs E drove across the desert, with impromptu strains of ‘It’s Marguerita Time’. By Status Quo. At which point our journey & Hunter S Thompson’s started diverging, and the weekend became officially lost.

And nowadays, when I think about taking this sort of trip, my immediate thoughts are:

Can I afford the time off work?

Who will look after the kids?

Will I get arrested?

How can I avoid a hangover?

How will I get enough sleep?

Will I still manage to get a run in every morning?

…all of which feels, let’s face it, a bit middle aged. And I wasn’t planning to get to middle aged, ever. And it gets worse…

I’ve bored readers of this blog before with tales of running and training, and I’m finally realising that I’m really getting on a bit. You will of course, be chorusing ‘Oh no you’re not’ at this point, but sadly, it’s true. I’ve been training up for the joys of the London Marathon in April, and training on the same sort of plan that I’ve been using for about 4-5 years. And, apart from the fact that I struggle a bit more to get out of the door these days, I’ve been doing the same sort of sessions. Irritatingly though, my 1km efforts this evening are about 20 seconds a mile slower than the pace that I ran for a whole marathon in 2004.

It being the London Marathon, my overriding fears are that a) I’ll do an ’embarrassing’ time and b) I’ll be overtaken by someone in fancy dress. Actually, this happened a couple of years ago when I was overtaken in the Mall by the runner going for the Guinness Book of Records entry for ‘Fastest Santa’. Given that his costume consisted of normal running gear with a light red cape over the top, I didn’t think that counted. No, metaphorically looking over my shoulder I can start to see a Rhino approaching.

So the grim reality that I am no longer 26, unable to knock out a training session in the morning, an evening of flaming sambukas and cigarettes in the evening, squeeze in a couple of hours of sleep, then do the same the next day, appears to be hitting home. But it’s not going to stop me from trying….