For reasons that needn’t concern us here, I’m spending a fair amount of my time in Newcastle. Newcastle has lots and lots going for it, but unfortunately for me, none of that lots and lots include it being particularly close to home, nor boasting a particularly tropical climate.

But, as our favourite cross dressing soul star would say, ‘wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home’. Or as the even more wonderful John Cooper-Clark would say, ‘wherever I lay my hat, that’s my hat’. Anyway, that’s where I am, hat wise, during the week. As I make a point of never, ever wearing a hat, as my family and friends make hilarious jibes about getting back onto the sunshine coach as soon as I put anything on my head, we’ll substitute running kit for hat. So, wherever I lay my running kit, that’s my running kit. Ok so far? Let me know if I go off on a tangent at any point, won’t you?

So I find myself running on some interesting new routes which, as many of them are taken on at night, can be, in their own way, pretty challenging. When im in Newcastle, I stay in a hotel next to St James Park. (By the way, if you want to really wind a taxi driver up in Newcastle, ask them to take you to the Sports Direct Arena. Hilarious. If you want to do the same in Edinburgh, ask your taxi driver how the tram construction is going, and whether it’s been value for money. Sit back, and the miles just fly by…) Anyway, next to St James Park is a proper park. And next to that is an absolutely massive park. And on that park are…cattle. In the middle of the city. Apparently you can track the seasons in Newcastle by when the cattle are allowed to graze on this common land. And, more excitingly, you are allowed to graze cattle if you’re a Freeman of the city. Really. Now I don’t know who is currently a Freeman of the city, but I do like to think that each year, there’s a back room of a pub somewhere, with Newcastle’s finest arguing the toss over grazing rights. Sting and Cheryl Cole are at a table deciding whether to put salt licks up this year. Eric Burdon and Alan Shearer are having a robust discussion about artificial insemination. Jimmy Nail barges in out of the cold…’it’s Freisian out there’, he quips…hilarity ensues… Honestly, the sitcom’s pretty much writing itself.

Anyway, the top and bottom of all of this is that where you run, at night, there are cows. All quite big cows, for that. A fully grown cow is, after all, well, the size of a cow. The paths through the park are quite well lit, but sometimes there’s a street light out and you have to be quite wary. I found myself shouting ‘COW’ to a fellow runner last night as she was coming towards me, I didn’t even think about it and it was supposed to be a warning, and I really, really hope it was taken as such.

Consequently, the gates in and out of the park, have to be, well, cow-proof. And I found this to my cost a few weeks back when doing an effort session through the park. I was running the last of four one-mile efforts, and in that sort of eyeballs out state that makes you think you’re Mo Farah on his last Olympic lap, whereas in fact you probably look more like Big Mo Harris ambling out of the Queen Vic on a Friday night. Anyway, at about 800 metres, I noticed another runner in front of me. This isn’t always good news when you do efforts, as you run the danger of running past someone who doesn’t want to be run past, if you see what I mean. And, to my horror, I realised that, if we both kept at this sort of pace, that we’d hit an upcoming gate at about the same time. And this was an effort, you know. Efforts have to be completed. The last one needs to be the same pace as the first. These are the rules of running.

To my surprise, the runner in front, having heard the panting of Big Mo Harris behind him, looked around and immediately sped up. And got to the gate first. And grabbed the gate and held it open. Honestly, I couldn’t have been happier. Here was a fellow sportsman, realising what I was trying to do, making my effort session work for me. In a tiny moment, we were bonding as runners. I did my best to smile as I swept past, and thanked him as much as my lactic-filled body would allow.

Unfortunately, at least one of us had misjudged my pace, and just as I passed my New Best Friend, he let go of the gate. I mentioned before that these gates are designed to stop cattle from wandering out onto the road, and in order to do so, they have springs in them that are best described as industrial. So there wasn’t much time between ‘let go of the gate’ and ‘get out of the way of the gate’. Consequently, as I burst into my final 400 metres of the night, the stupidly heavy gate smashed against my arm like a steam hammer. I wasn’t really sure what to do at this point. I honestly thought I’d broken my arm, but it wasn’t really something I wanted to complain about. My NBF, after all, had just done me a favour, so I decided to try to ignore it, and keep our relationship on a positive footing. And, to my delight, about a minute’s run away were some trees and bushes.

With tears welling in my eyes, I finished the effort, turned right and stopped. The noise that came out of me at that point was something along the lines of “nggggghhhhhhhhhhuuuuhhhh”. I hoped that it was at a low enough volume for my partner in athletics not to worry too much.

I mentioned this tale to a running friend who suggested that there might have been something vindictive in a runner letting a gate spring back, along the lines of ‘that’s what you get when you try to overtake me’, but I’d like to think it was a genuine mistake. But if you’re running at night in Newcastle and someone holds a gate open for you, you might want to speed up just in case.

Hurry up Harry!

As you may have noticed, the Emu has been on something of a summer, not to mention an autumn break. Not one that’s been particularly intended, but it’s kind of happened that every waking hour has been spent doing stuff other than recording my innermost thoughts in order for one or two people to chance over my workings and tut loudly*.

And many, many of those waking hours have been spent at work. And many of those many, many hours have been spent on one or other end of an email chain.

I have vague recollections of what life was like before email, although I’m not entirely sure whether I remember that clearly how we ever got on with communicating at work. I do remember going to meet people and having conversations, then going home and having a break, but that may be just an old man’s memory playing tricks. I definitely went to a presentation in the late 1980’s, where an enthusiastic user of email stood up to say that if email and the telephone had been invented at the same time then the phone would never have taken off, as it was so intrusive to our waking lives. So we do seem to have come full circle on that one. 

Coincidentally, my falling out of love with email, and the security tagging device that is the Blackberry, came around about the same time that I stopped going to the pub. And I stopped going to the pub, partly because the sorts of people who were going to the pub were beginning to irritate me. And this in itself was slightly ironic, because I find myself living in a virtual email pub, with a number of behaviours that are stopping me from enjoying a quiet beer.

For a start, it’s much, much too loud. I’m getting hundreds of conversations a day to listen to, and I can’t decide whether to join in on any of them.

Theres a bloke in one corner who, for reasons best known to himself, is behaving in an aggressive shouty fashion, and irritating anyone within earshot. He’s normally perfectly reasonable, but once he gets inside the pub…

There’s another bloke with a really really loud voice, who seems to think that everybody in the place will need to know about his every waking thought. He likes to address 20-30 people at a time, to save time. He’s got a number of mates who like to add their own opinions (and these often appear to be just for the sake of form) to the same 20-30 people. Even if these initial discussions are interesting, then the subsequent ones are really hard to follow.

Every now and again, someone comes up to me in the pub and says that they’ve been pointed towards me by someone who knows I’ll be interested in them. They weren’t, and I’m not.

Unfortunately, my own special brand of OCD means that I can’t leave the pub until all of these discussions have been had and closed. And if I stop at the bar for half an hour to have a drink, I turn round and they’re all there again, like some unpleasant Greek Hydra. (As opposed to a pleasant Hydra, but you know what I mean.)

Every now and again I nip down to Zuckermans bar or Jack Dorsey’s place, as they’re supposed to be trendier than my local, but I just find that people speak more quicky, more loudly, to more people, and I can’t really get a proper discussion going.

Anyway, I do need a drink. Don’t be there when I turn around. If you need to contact me, write me a letter.

*yes, I mean you

It’s Mother’s Day in the Emu household. Not normally a great cause of celebration, as Mrs Emu, forever a martyr to the cause, is as normal running around trying to fit a thousand weekend chores into the brief gaps between going for a run, writing reports, driving kids about etc. So the jr Emus are tasked largely with not trying to make her day any harder than normal, rather than starting from the base of breakfast in bed, rose petals on the duvet, and on demand peppermint foot rubs. And this, they largely do until mid afternoon, when the normal calm of the household is broken by the bloodcurdling (and frankly rather high-pitched) screaming from #3, upstairs. Mrs E and I immediately come to the same conclusion, ie that #1 has taken a break from his A level revision to sit on #3’s head. Again. So I’m despatched upstairs, in a role that I like to think bridges a gap between Kofi Anan and Dirty Harry. To my surprise, #1 is on the landing, not looking at all like a cheeky bully, but more like a very worried brother. And #3 is in the bathroom, running his hand under the cold water tap, and trying to stem the bleeding.

I say ‘trying to stem’, because it’s a fairly futile task. As we will later discover, he’s managed to cut through an artery in his hand, and we’re getting a live demonstration of just how powerful a pumping heart is – at a rate of about 100 beats a minute, his hand sprays claret all over the bathroom at an alarming velocity. It’s like stumbling into the set of The Omen, or possible the scene in the police station in ‘Withnail & I’.

Very, very, very fortunately, the love of my life is also an experienced nurse, and pretty rapid at getting up stairs – taking control of the situation she manages to stem the horror movie flow and bark out a series of commands that get the three of us out of the door in record time and pointing in the direction of A&E.

As the alpha male in the family, I immediately take on the role of ambulance driver. It’s only a couple of miles to the hospital, and I feel justified in driving like a, well, like I’m at the wheel of a minicab. Fortunately my wife is good enough to break away from her nursing duties in the back seat to kindly point out the flaws in my driving style, and indeed, the likelihood that we are all going to die if I don’t slow down. I forgot to mention that I’m also slightly hampered in my high speed journey by not being able to see terribly well. I’ve had to wear glasses for driving for about 5 years, and they’ve have been broken for about four. And that morning, despite the last superglue repair, one of the arms had finally come off. Thus I was actually having to balance the glasses on one ear and my nose, an interesting challenge when approaching a roundabout at speed, for example. The whole journey, brief though it was, was conducted with a driver looking like he was in the middle of a minor stroke, while his passengers alternately were crying with pain and shouting out instructions on how to drive. Anyway, we got there.

And during the journey and in the hospital, where incidentally, we enjoyed the kind of fabulous NHS care that frankly, I’m going to miss post ‘reform’*, we managed to piece together what had happened…

We live on a fairly busy street, and #3’s bedroom faces out to the road. So he can sit at the window and watch the world go by. And that afternoon, a girl from his class was walking past. He is at pains to point out that there is no love interest involved here, but I think we’re all impressed that he was banging on his window so enthusiastically to attract her attention that he managed to punch right through it up to his lower arm. Given that his punching ability has been a cause of some mirth in the house for a number of years, perhaps it was the power of passion that took over, a bit like those stories of mothers who lift up the back of trucks to free their trapped children.

Anyway, he’s ok now. He’s milking the inability to write, play the piano, wash up and cut up his food, but no real harm done, and it’s nice in a way that he’s got an excuse not to do these things, as normally he just skives off anyway.

And you’ll want to know what happened to the girl. Well, she walked off. Completely oblivious to the bloodfest that she’d caused a few feet above her, and the pathetic sight of #3’s arm flopping about in her general direction, out of the broken window. Girls, huh? You can work really hard to get their attention, and then they just wander off. Still, might be the first, doubt it’ll be the last. 

* I’m serious. #3 was seen immediately, triaged really quickly, given pain relief, X-rayed and stitched efficiently by considerate staff who seemed to really care for the health of our child. I would dearly have loved a chat with Andrew Lansley that afternoon.

So, we’re having dinner, on the day before #2’s birthday. Naturally, the boys manage to ignore number 2 and concentrate on birthdays further ahead.

“What are you going to do on your birthday, Dad?”, says #3

“Well, son 3”, I say, “It’s a big birthday this year, so I’m thinking about running a mile for each year that I’ve been alive. And I’m going to ask lots of my friends if they want to run part of it with me”

“Wow, can I run it too?”

“Yes, but  you’ll have to run your age too, you know”

“Hmmm, 13 miles…not really sure I fancy that”

A pause

“Not going to be very fair on Grandad, is it?”

There’s something about a city and its relationship with football that is hard to articulate, but reasonably easy to feel. I found myself in Newcastle a few weeks ago, Newcastle United had just got their new Virgin Money sponsorship, and went on that night to beat Man United – the next day people were forever opening doors for one another, tipping their hats and patting small children on the head. In contrast, in Norwich a couple of year ago, when the Canaries slipped into what old gits like me still call the Third Division, there was a level of grumpiness that had barely been seen since the great sugar beet crisis of 1953.

And it’s about Norwich, a city dear to my heart, that I write today, dear reader. And to get the drift of this, you need to know a bit about the city, or, more importantly, the people in it. So let’s imagine the city as a person (bear with me). When I go to London, it feels like the default face position is a marked furrowing of the brow. When I go to Edinburgh, there’s a bit of creasing around the eyes. When I’m in Newcastle, everyone seems to have turned these creases into laugh lines. And when I’m in Norwich…well, the face is completely relaxed, but there’s something very suspicious about the eyes and the way that they look at you. By suspicious, I mean worried in the bad times about what’s going wrong, and worried in the good times about what might go wrong. Which is kind of the mood of the moment in Norwich – there’s a good feeling about the place, in no small part linked to the football club, but also a deep, and very British, suspicion, that any minute now, we’re all going to be found out and we’ll, well, drop down a couple of divisions. Really, it’s about a sense that we’ve never had it so good, but we shouldn’t be boasting about it just yet, as something could go horribly wrong.

And nowhere is that more evident than at Norwich City every week, when Grant Holt takes to the pitch. Everybody (with the exception of opposition defenders, who claim he falls over a bit too easily) loves Grant Holt. If your not familiar with him, he often gets referred to in the press as an ‘old fashioned centre forward’. Which effectively means that he’s a big bloke who makes trouble up front. There’s probably a bit more to him than that, for all I know he may be a connoisseur of vintage wines, an enthusiastic opera fan or a keen gardener, but around 3pm on a Saturday afternoon, all Norwich really wants from him is to be a big bloke making trouble up front.

Which is largely what they get, but in a manner that reflects the mentality that I was struggling to describe earlier. Let’s take an example, from when Norwich played West Brom in January. Lambert decides to play Holt as a left winger, and at 1-1, with 11 minutes to go, he’s released to run on to a ball down the line. Actually, I’m simplifying that one a bit. The ball’s played past Holt with his back to goal. You know those clips of George Best turning on a sixpence and wrong-footing defences? Well, Grant Holt doesn’t do that. He actually has something of a turning circle, in that in order to face in the other direction he runs forward for a bit, then starts indicating right. After this manoeuvre, he’s finally facing in the right direction, and, like all the best heavy vehicles, starts gathering some momentum. After about 20 yards, you really wouldn’t want to get in his way. He catches up with the ball and clips in an absolutely perfect cross, which Steve Morison heads home like a bullet. And then, really, we get the best bit of all. Because that’s when he turns around to celebrate. Actually, this takes a couple of seconds, as he has to extricate himself out of the advertising hoarding and then negotiate another 180 degree turn, which as we’ve already noted, can take a little while. But when he does, it’s all worth it. Because he’s got a smile on his face that’s about 9 yards wide, as he waits for Morison to make his way over. When you’re Grant Holt and you’ve made that sort of effort, it’s important that the celebrations come to you after all.

And Grant Holt’s huge daft smile says (to me) a really long sentence. It says:

“I really can’t believe it because I just managed to make another goal and it’s in the Premier league and only a couple of years ago I was playing non league football and before that I was fitting tyres and now I’m in this fantastic position that I’m not sure I actually deserve but sod it it seems to be working out all right because we’ve won another game and even though we thought at the start of the season that we might be going straight down for some reason we seem to be knocking them in and we’re having exactly the kind of fun that we all thought we might have when we started off playing football when we were kids, even though our entire squad cost less that the cheapest Chelsea player but who cares because this is all just too good to be true so we’d better bloody celebrate because who knows when the bubble might burst…”.

Well, that’s what I think he’s thinking anyway. And if he is, then he ought to know that it’s pretty much what the rest of the Fine City think too.