keep on running

A couple of follow-up items to the last post, which was getting a bit long anyway:

My general running career outside of parkrunning comprises a very small number of other events, spread over a large number of years. Most significantly, I ran two half-marathons in the space of about six months back in 2004 and 2005. As always, for someone who doesn't just naturally love running, as some maniacs appear to do, the interesting question here is one of motivation, and I think a couple of friends hatched the idea and I signed up in a brief spasm of enthusiasm, far enough away from the actual date that it didn't quite seem real. 

Of course it does eventually start to seem real, and among some of the endless slogging around the Downs on training runs I did compete in a couple of 10-kilometre races as a warm up: the Nailsea 10K which I remember being intermittently hilly but which I smashed round in 51:38, and the Frampton Cotterell 10K which I recall finding much more difficult despite it being flatter and which I ran in a slower (though still perfectly respectable in hindsight) 52:59.

The actual Bristol half-marathon was on a day of slightly odd weather - warm intervals broken up by one torrential downpour on the long out-and-back stretch along the Portway. I was suffering quite a bit by the end but managed to muster enough of a sprint finish to duck under the two-hour mark at 1:59:45.

I can't really remember what motivated me to then sign up for the Bath half-marathon in 2005 - presumably the desire to prove to myself that I could do a faster time than the first one. The main thing I remember was that the preparatory training regime was a lot tougher, since the training period was in the winter rather than the summer as it had been for Bristol (the actual races being in spring and autumn respectively) and entailed a lot of running in the dark. Anyway, I shaved just over a minute off my Bristol time at 1:58:40 and promptly retired from long-distance running.

That was basically it, 5K parkruns aside, until 2018 when Hazel suggested doing a challenge and came up with the Newport 10K. So we did that, and then discovered that a couple of friends had signed up for the Cardiff 10K, so we did that one as well. I ran a perfectly decent 55:08 for Newport and a slightly less impressive 58:04 at Cardiff, which I recall being very congested at the start and a much hotter day.

Finally, a few notes on parkrun courses I have run at, for the benefit of anyone thinking of having a go. Numbers in brackets are the number of times I've run there (as of today):

• Newport (18): At Tredegar House, mostly off-road, a couple of possible course layouts depending on season, weather and other things going on in the grounds, but all incorporating the section through the woods round the back of the artificial lake which can be quite muddy.
• Riverfront (17): Fast, flat, out-and-back course along the Usk in the town centre. Downstream and therefore slightly downhill on the way out, upstream and therefore slightly uphill on the way back but still a good one for a PB. As with any out-and-back course you have to be wary of runners (especially the super-speedy guys at the front) coming back the other way.
• Rogiet (7): at Rogiet Countryside Park, 3 laps, mostly flat but for one up-and-down hump at the far end of the course. Occasionally frequented by quiz maestro and possible canal-based murderer CJ de Mooi.
• Cwmbran (2): Occasional re-routings but usually starts by the boating lake and incorporates at least one lap of it. Fast and flat in the dry, off-road sections sometimes slippery and treacherous at other times. Ends by an ice-cream shop, though, which is nice.
• Wycombe Rye (1): Covered elsewhere but mostly flat, varied surfaces including grass at start and finish, bizarre little mini-section in the middle where you have to run up a series of steps in a wooded area and down again the other side.
• Severn Bridge (1): Out-and-back across the old Severn Bridge. As with most long-span bridges it's less flat than you might imagine; the turn-around point is just past the halfway point of the bridge so it's mostly uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back (i.e. the reverse of Riverfront).
• Meadowmill (1): Near Prestonpans, a few miles east of Edinburgh. Bagged on our Scottish holiday in the summer. Generally just a couple of laps of a field by a leisure centre with an odd little narrow out-and-back section to the back of Prestonpans railway station. 
• Tremorfa (1): Over on the east side of Cardiff, next to a giant Tesco which provides handy parking. Flat, fast, three-lap figure-of-eight course which I'd have been hoping for a decent time at had I not been struggling with a miserable cold. But it was the only available weekend so the challenge must take precedence. 
• Belvoir Castle (1): Off-road, out-and-back course near the entrance to the castle. Hilly. Downhill sections delightful (though you need to watch your footing), uphill ones, to quote myself, a bit of a bitch. 
• Llanfoist Crossing (1): New one (started in November) just round the corner from where my parents live. Mostly on an old railway line but nonetheless noticeably uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back, and with a little detour into a grassy park around the halfway point which can be slippery and involves a steepish hill to get back onto the main route. 

running joke

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but one that I did make at the start of 2024 (pretty much the only serious one I've ever made, actually, thinking about it) was to get out to the parkrun a bit more often, and since "a bit more often" is unacceptably woolly and just invites weaselling out or retrospective redefinition of the challenge to accommodate laziness, I made it a bit more specific: at least one parkrun every calendar month during 2024. So that means every month of the year has to include a parkrun, no skipping March and doing two in April, for instance; that doesn't count. 

I am a tedious evangelist for parkrun as a thing - all you have to do is register, save your membership barcode in some form (this used to mean some physical format but as of recently includes just having it saved on your phone), turn up, and run five kilometres (a smidge over three miles). That's it; all the timing and collating of results is done for you, including collection and analysis of your own personal stats. It's great, and for the reluctant runner (something I would definitely class myself as) provides just enough structure and accountability to encourage participation while not making the bar to entry too high. Running with a large group of other people of extremely mixed abilities has advantages as well; some find the whole community spirit and post-run chat and coffee thing delightful, while some (like me) don't really go for that but find it helpful and motivating to run in a group including lots of other people who are not conspicuously thinner and fitter than them but who are nonetheless not succumbing to the temptation to walk for a bit or just jack the whole thing in and slope off for a pint and a fag.

My brief parkrun history is as follows: I became aware of it back in the early noughties when some friends from Newbury started going regularly to the Greenham Common one and (as people tend to do) evangelising their ass off about it to all and sundry. No disrespect intended to those people, but I looked at them and thought, well, I could probably do that. This was around the time that parkrun (which started in late 2004 in Bushy Park in west London but only added a handful of events in its early years) really started to take off, and my first one was at Tredegar House (which bagged the Newport parkrun name as it was the first in the area in 2011) in March 2013, at which I ran a perfectly respectable 28:58 (that's me approaching the finish line on the right). I did another in May of that year and then took a brief sabbatical for around five and a half years before doing my next one at Riverfront in central Newport (which had started up in 2017) in September 2018. 

That pattern of occasional dabblings continued until early 2020 when Nia, who'd been a reasonably regular participant at the junior parkrun (two kilometres) decided that she'd like to upgrade to the adult version. We did a couple, the second of which in March 2020 turned out to be the last one before the COVID lockdown regulations prevented large groups of people getting together to breathe heavily and sweat over each other for around eighteen months. We participated in the first one back at Riverfront in August 2021 (and got our picture in the paper!) by which time it was clearly evident to me that I was on borrowed time in terms of finishing in front of Nia, or even keeping up with her for any length of time. 

Even after that participation was a bit patchy, though - having done three in the remainder of 2021 and an excellent nine in the first seven months of 2022 I then did none in the rest of 2022 and not a single one in 2023, for reasons I have no recollection of and therefore must just have been apathy. And so by the end of that year I obviously felt that some structure needed to be imposed.

Anyway, long story short, having done a total of eighteen parkruns up to the start of 2024 I fulfilled the terms of the challenge by doing fourteen in 2024 - double-up months were the nice friendly summer months of June and August, the second one in August being my first proper bit of parkrun tourism as we went to Wycombe Rye and had a minor celebrity encounter as described here. In renewing the challenge for 2025 I added a couple of optional stretch objectives: do more parkruns in total than in 2024, and have a crack at getting to fifty in total by the end of the year. That second one would entail doing eighteen during the year, something I'm here to tell you I achieved by running the new Llanfoist Crossing parkrun in early December. I'm slightly reluctant to make a big thing of it, although it's significant to me, as I personally know people whose tally stands at well over a hundred and the guy I spent most of the December parkrun behind (though I'd like it noted that I had him in the sprint finish) was wearing a 250 T-shirt, and I have seen a few 500s at other parkruns. 

I fully intend to renew the basic one-per-month resolution for 2026, though I'm not sure exceeding eighteen for the year is realistic. 

A few random observations to finish:

• My personal best progression is a bit of an odd one: while some people spend years nibbling off a few seconds here and there I set a target of 26:11 at my first ever Riverfront parkrun in 2018 and didn't improve on it until May 2025 when I ran 25:44. Not wanting to have that stand for another seven years I subsequently lowered it again to its current mark of 25:29 (at Riverfront again) in August.
• The watershed of Nia's PB being faster than mine was crossed in September 2024 when she ran 26:05 at Riverfront and she has remained ahead since (and I'm sure will permanently). Her current PB stands at just over a minute faster than mine at 24:36.
• You'll notice that Riverfront seems to be a PB-friendly course, and so it is. This is highly dependent on gradient and terrain, and Riverfront is pretty flat and on tarmac all the way. The one at Tredegar House, by contrast, is mostly flat but there are roots and rocks and mud to cope with so it's never as fast. The hilliest one I have done is at Belvoir Castle up in Leicestershire. 

the last book I read

The Beginning Of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald.

Frank Reid has a lot on his plate right now. Firstly there's Reid's, the family printing firm founded in Moscow by his father that he now runs, with the associated admin headaches - managing the staff with all their personal foibles, managing the occasional state suspicion of a foreign-run printing operation with its inbuilt potential to print Unsuitable Material, the associated need to occasionally grease the wheels of officialdom with some judicious bribery - but Frank has lived in Moscow most of his life and views this as mundane day-to-day business, although the current febrile political situation in Europe (it's 1913) makes everything a bit more difficult. Of more specific and immediate concern is the letter he's just received from his wife Nellie telling him that she has left him, taking their three children with her. No hard feelings, look after yourself, yours etc., Nellie.

There's no immediate indication where Nellie has headed off to, although everyone's assumption is that she's caught a train heading westwards to head back to Europe and perhaps ultimately her family's home in the south London suburb of Norbury. This theory is proven to be correct in an unexpected way when the three children turn up back at the Moscow railway station, having been put on a train back at Mozhaisk. No sign of Nellie, who apparently had continued in the opposite direction, presumably heading for Berlin.

So Frank is reunited with his kids, Dolly, Ben and little Annushka, which is great but does now pose another problem: who's going to look after them? After a couple of meetings with his eccentric business associate Kuriatin and the wife of the local Anglican chaplain fail to yield anyone who Frank feels is suitable, he is persuaded by his accountant Selwyn Crane to take on Lisa, a young woman of his acquaintance currently unhappily employed at a local department store.

So Frank can return to work at Reid's, but even here is immediately beset by other problems: Selwyn has persuaded him to do a small run of a book of his own poems and is taking a minute interest in the details, the chief print-setter is a man of almost mystical skill, somewhat temperamental and sensitive to upcoming developments in automated print-setting technology which will likely make his job obsolete, and lastly while checking up on the printing premises late at night Frank is confronted by a young student, Volodya, who attempts to shoot him (and misses) and then describes some vague scheme to get Reid's to facilitate the printing of some political leaflets. Frank lets him go and uses some of his skill and influence to persuade the police not to investigate.

Further complication is provided by the arrival of Charlie, Nellie's brother, who Frank had accepted an offer of a visit from on the assumption that he would have some information regarding Nellie, or maybe even have seen her. No such luck, however, and Charlie, an engaging enough doofus, just bumbles around having a nice holiday and entertaining the kids. 

The plot-thickening that happens comes from an unexpected direction and mainly involves Lisa - firstly Volodya reappears and confesses to Frank that the political leaflet thing was a red herring and he took a pot-shot at him because he is in love with Lisa, despite barely knowing her. This is vexing to Frank because he himself has decided that he is in love with Lisa. Finally Selwyn confesses to Frank that he, Selwyn, was in love with Nellie and that they had made tentative plans to run away together, plans which he, Selwyn, then scuppered by having an attack of conscience about betraying Frank. Nellie has apparently been staying at a Tolstoyan commune in England, at Selwyn's suggestion, but has found it not to her taste and left for an unknown destination.

Lisa, as it happens, is currently away at the Reids' ramshackle dacha with the children having a brief holiday, though one which includes a slightly bizarre late-night encounter in the forest between Lisa, Dolly and some mysterious wordless people who seem to emerge from the trees. Whatever that was all about, the eventual outcome is another call to Frank requesting that he collect his children from the railway station, Lisa having seemingly taken the opportunity to flee the country. 

A lot for Frank to take in here, to be fair, and just to cap it off, while the house shutters are being opened for the springtime thaw, Nellie returns.

The first thing to say here is that there's a lot of slyly-observed interpersonal stuff that I've skipped over in the synopsis above, which seems remarkable in a book of only 188 pages. This is the trick that Penelope Fitzgerald regularly pulls, though; you'll recall I said something very similar about The Gate Of Angels which was even shorter. Frank Reid is a level-headed and unflappable sort of chap who provides a contrast with the more eccentric characters who revolve around him, particularly the two main female protagonists, Nellie and Lisa, both of whose motivation are somewhat opaque. Lisa in particular is a bit of a mystery; she exerts a strange hold over Selwyn, Volodya and Frank and seems to be in control of the weird encounter in the forest with Dolly. Is she some sort of revolutionary agitator? Probably, but who knows? And what are we to make of Nellie's return? A change of heart, or a pragmatic realisation that this is her best option after running away (with or without Selwyn) didn't work out? It seems likely that with the Reids' reputation tarnished by the Lisa situation and with both war and revolution in the offing that the Reids' best option is going to be to sell the printing business and move back to England, which is probably what Nellie really wants anyway.

I think this is the fourth Penelope Fitzgerald book I've read, and they really are unlike just about anything else: short, but rich and dense and slightly mysterious. They're all good but this one and The Gate Of Angels are probably the best two. The Russian setting features in a few other books on this list, most obviously Winter Garden by Fitzgerald's rough contemporary (and writer of superficially similar novels) Beryl Bainbridge, but also more tangentially in Pattern Recognition and Love Is Blind and quite possibly a few others. The eve-of-World-War-I setting is also familiar from Waiting For Sunrise and both of the Isabel Colegate books on this list, Statues In A Garden and The Shooting Party. 

The Beginning Of Spring was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988, just as The Gate Of Angels was two years later; she was nominated four times in total and won with Offshore in 1979. Peter Carey won in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda, which I have read but, as I've said elsewhere, found a bit of a slog. Utz and Nice Work are the other two I've read from that year. 

chapter and curse

Bored with the lack of challenge involved in picking off eighty- and ninety-something authors as it has been recently, The Curse Of Electric Halibut has decided to pick off someone from the slightly lower age bracket, just to keep everyone on their toes, those who haven't just turned up their toes, anyway. And it is Daniel Woodrell, most famous for his 2006 novel Winter's Bone and its 2010 film adaptation. That's the only thing of his I've ever read, back in early 2016, but that was enough for the beady eye of death to swing slowly in his direction. Woodrell's age (72) and the curse length of a whisker under ten years are respectively about ten years below and a couple of years above the current averages.

 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	94	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Isabel Colegate	24th October 2009	12th March 2023	91	13y 140d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d
Christopher Priest	6th January 2015	4th February 2024	80	9y 26d
Paul Auster	22nd April 2012	30th April 2024	77	12y 8d
Kinky Friedman	19th December 2007	27th June 2024	79	16y 191d
David Lodge	4th March 2008	1st January 2025	89	16y 301d
Jennifer Johnston	23rd July 2012	25th February 2025	95	12y 215d
Mario Vargas Llosa	12th April 2007	13th April 2025	89	18y 1d
Frederick Forsyth	8th November 2021	9th June 2025	86	3y 214d
Daniel Woodrell	12th January 2016	28th November 2025	72	9y 320d

the last book I read

Day by A.L. Kennedy.

Alfie Day has had a better war than some; still alive, for one thing, and moreover with all of his limbs and most of his mental faculties intact, a bit of PTSD aside. This is doubly lucky as his job as the tail gunner on a Lancaster bomber would qualify as one of the more thrillingly high-risk jobs, even within the context of being in the RAF during World War II. 

The book's nominal "now" is a handful of years after the end of the war, with Alfie having decided to take up an offer of being an extra in a film set during the war, for which filming is taking place in some unspecified eastern European country. A somewhat quixotic decision, on the face of it, what with it bringing back memories of his wartime experiences both as part of his bomber crew but also as a prisoner of war after his last bombing mission resulted in the deaths of most of his crew and his having to bail out over enemy territory. Maybe the idea was that re-confronting some of this stuff would bring some sort of closure and enable him to come to terms with things; more importantly of course it provides a narrative backdrop to some flashback action wherein we are dropped back into a set of selected scenes from the war.

These sections are mainly concerned with the series of bombing raids Alfie's crew carries out, with the imminence of potential fiery death at all times, and the associated brittle banter and camaraderie. It's not all getting raked by tracer fire, performing evasive manoeuvres and firebombing Dresden, though, my goodness no. There are occasional bouts of leave wherein the crew get to do some rest and relaxation, get to know each other, and do the obligatory drinking and roistering. Alfie also meets a young lady called Joyce while sheltering from an air-raid and a tentative romance develops, tempered by Joyce's admission that she has a husband, albeit one whom she doesn't really like very much and who is away on military duty from which there's no guarantee he'll ever return. 

The present-day setting isn't purely a narrative device to hang some flashbacks off, though; the motley crew of actors and ex-servicemen that constitutes the film's cast holds some interest, in particular Vasyl, a slightly shady character who may be Ukrainian or may equally possibly be Latvian. Alfie's initial assumption that he was a heroic resistance fighter in one or other of those countries is somewhat undercut by Vasyl's later admission that he was basically a Big Old Nazi and responsible for some eye-watering atrocities during the war that he will now face no consequences for, or not via the standard legal route anyway. Alfie and his mates may have an eye to some less formal vigilante-style justice once filming duties are out of the way, though.

Alfie is briefly tempted by making the most of the opportunities that exist for an exciting life of crime in the lax post-war regime in mainland Europe, but eventually returns to England, perhaps partly persuaded by the idea of rekindling his relationship with Joyce. We are invited to infer that things have simmered down to the occasional exchange of letters after Joyce's husband rather inconveniently returned alive and well from the war, but the latest letters suggest that she may be open to some sort of, hem hem, arrangement.

World War II is a prime subject for fiction, as any novel set here comes pre-loaded with interest, danger, the great sweep of history, and all that stuff, and there are quite a few books on this list that use it as a backdrop, most recently Light Perpetual, Fragrant Harbour and Charlotte Gray (the review of The Reader has a fuller list). Just to illustrate the wide palette of choices available to you as an author, the first two there treat the war as just a brief interlude in the wider timeline of the story, while Charlotte Gray embeds pretty much the entire story in the context of the war. There are also varying degrees of success, and you need to be careful not to draw accusations of just throwing some wartime stuff in there to weigh the story down with a bit of unearned gravitas, something you'll recall I thought Light Perpetual was guilty of.

I don't think that criticism can be made of Day, but it seemed to be, although well-written and involving, slightly unsatisfactory for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. The framing device of the film shoot is odd, and Alfie's reasons for being there are never explained - as a mildly-traumatised ex-serviceman it seems like the last thing you'd want to do and it invites the suspicion that he did it just because it provided a convenient narrative scaffolding to hang the other stuff off. The most interesting thing that Alfie actually does (or we are strongly invited to infer that he does, anyway) during the various flashbacks, which is to murder his abusive father by pushing him in a canal, is mentioned briefly and then never referred to again. Ursula K Le Guin offers some criticisms here, most of which I find myself in agreement with.

Maybe the answer is to be found by looking at Kennedy's other work - the two novels featured here, So I am Glad and Looking For The Possible Dance, are quirky character-driven things with a fairly narrow domestic setting. Some of the charm of that seems to have been lost here in the attempt to embed Alfie's story within the wider sweep of history, an attempt perhaps made because that's the sort of thing that wins literary awards, and sure enough Day won the Costa Novel Award (formerly the Whitbread Award and defunct since 2022) in 2007. I think Days Without End is the most recent other Costa winner on this list; that review also contains a list of other winners featured on this blog.