Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Run, Forest

There was a time when I ran cross-country races like it was going out of fashion. Perhaps that's because I knew it was about to do just that: for after my twelfth birthday, there would be no more competitive running. Doing what could be done incidentally, whether playing on a football pitch, dashing for a train, or fleeing from malicious, stink-bug wielding colleagues - was no longer cool. Run when necessary, of course. But fun-run? The greatest rhyming oxymoron in the English language.

Last Saturday, I discovered that competitive running is still - not very cool. I signed up for the 'College Cuppers Day' (hooray!), a 10km course around an idyllic Cambridgeshire wood. Thinking it could be a useful exercise to measure just how fit I really was, not to mention an interesting theatre I had never been involved in, I enlisted without further question. I showed up at the number collection point, pinned on my unique paper number, looked around, and realised I knew not a soul. People were milling in college groups; but I hadn't even bothered to check that other people from my college were running. Two hours to race time. I slouched against a handy wall and became more aware of my hangover. More aware, also, of my failure to bring book or music entertainment. So I pretended to read a map of the London tube, while my ears ventured hungrily around the room, searching for juicy snippets.

As a sidenote, snippets at Cambridge are nuggeted gold. I walked through King's bar the other day and overheard two. Snippet 1: '...it's like the signifier and the signified...'. Snippet 2: '...as Kant would say...'. Those were gems; but the race day conversation was not so high-brow. Still, it was no less standard for that. Academic self-deprecation translates easily to a sporting context. There were things like 'Oh god, this is the last place I want to be...' and 'I'm not ready for this, I shouldn't have drunk so much last night...'. Now there's modesty, and then there's Ms. Undergraduate doing her best to appear all worn-out and dejected. Come on, Ms. Undergrad. We both know you were in bed by 9pm last night. I'd breathalyse you now, but for fear that it would be more awkward in a context outside my imagination.

Anyway, these snippets were making me a little edgy. When Cambridge students energetically downplay stuff like that, you know they're taking it seriously. As time elapsed, and the relative locations of Victoria and Piccadilly Circus burnt into memory, more and more jackets came off, revealing more and more singlets: 'Jesus College Running', 'Team Trinity' etc. Coloured and themed. Well then. Enjoy your singlets, ladies and gents. I for one choose to run my races in my girlfriend's black tights, loose-fitting boardshorts, ragged gloves and a jacket with a phone-shaped hole in the front pocket. Speed-singlets may look good, but what I lack in professionalism, I make up for in sheer aerodynamism. We'll see who has the last laugh.

Needless to say I got comprehensively beaten. I came somewhere in the middle...all I know is that the winner beat my by six minutes. That's considerable, in a forty minute race. While it would have been wonderful to pull off a dark horse victory, I'd discounted that from the moment we arrived at the course. So, visualise a paddock, cow-patted and all, with a small grove of trees in the middle. People put down their bags (containing spikes and packed lunches), and start warming up. Safely back home, I now realise that this was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. Men and women in tracksuits getting warm in every conceivable way: sprints, jogs, legs-up, heels-up, stretches, push-ups, downhill, cross-hill. I walked the course (autumnal woodland - pleasant, if it were not about to be trampled) with some nice young lads, the conversation was flowing, until - 'Let's run this last bit then shall we?'. Running, running everywhere. I was alerted to how rare the run is in everyday life by its extreme concentration here. I had entered an asylum of running madpeople.

The race itself was even more bizarre. Comments made on the sporting field are fairly inane at the best of times. In football, there's necessary communication of course: 'pass it square', for example. But there's also the morale-boosting/general command shout, which probably constitutes a good proportion of the chatter on ground: 'Mark up!', 'First to the ball!', 'Save, keeps!' etc. Now, the range of possible expressions is reasonable in a game like football, where the competitors do different things and stuff actually happens. But in running? It would be make it sound more honourable than it actually is to say 'Wow, what a run he's having, he's putting one foot in front of the other and moving generally straight ahead so well today!'. As we circled the track, the spectators (all lady runners just finished their race) dug out two pearlers, which they mixed and matched in colourful combinations: 'Good running!' and 'Keep Going!'. Cheers...thank you, and I will.

I suppose the funniest element for me was just witnessing enthusiasm in action. At times I forget how many wonderful nerds there are out there, investing so much zeal in a very specific area. Yes, I know I do classics. Blind spot noted. But seeing people behaving so seriously towards something I was lazily indifferent about felt refreshing, and, well, 'fun'. Scarier is how quickly I found myself buying into the hot competition merely by absorbing a competitive environment. I set my target mid-race on this weedy little guy that was always just in front of me. I inched closer until I could hear him weezing. Then I strode past on the final lap. Another guy I passed said 'not you again'. The private battles and psychological conflicts, the highs, the lows. Running was the stuff of life. Good running, yes sir!

The adrenalin subsided, I almost vomited, downed some free biscuits, and went back home. Thinking, on the come-down, that competitive running affords a very quick route to uncoolness. Around forty minutes precisely; or thirty-four, if you're in a real hurry.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Age Shall Not Weary Them...

Permission to get sombre requested.

This post begins, again, with a seminar. We're not doubling up, I assure you: this time the seminar will serve purely as point of departure. So, we depart. I went to a seminar/lecture/talk hybrid this afternoon as part of the 'Classics Speaker Series', a brand of events designed to get the old and distinguished hands of classical scholarship back on the lecture circuit. These venerable, late-career sages are brought in to impart their years of wisdom to the younger generations, reflecting on their time in academic (and other) life, while providing statuesque examples for the bright-eyed kids to themselves aspire to. At least I think that's the ethos, having only been to one of them. At any rate, that was certainly the gist of the day.

The speaker was old-school as they come: he'd trained under some star dons whose flower of youth arrived late in the 19th century. His sheer scholarly lifespan meant that he'd brushed pencils with another age, with an altogether different cast of heroes. This was the card he (as he always inevitably would have) played in titling his talk 'Then and Now (and Some of the Bits Between)'. Then, and Now. The big contrast. In my day, we didn't have playful titles for lectures. Nor brackets in titles. And I absolutely refuse to insert cola and subtitles. So I went in anticipating the thread: a quaint anachronism of a man making a few modest observations on time and change.

I wasn't disappointed at the first visuals. Grey hair, spectacles struggling to contain licentious eyebrows, tweed jacket, vest and tie. The code for geriatric professor was still intact, I was relieved to discover. When he started speaking, things proceeded quite as expected: first, a diverting account of what it was like to learn Latin and Greek at school in the thirties. Then, some of the things he'd picked up from his esteemed teachers in his early days at Cambridge. So far, so standard. But then the opinions began to get a little controversial. The 'Now' bit morphed into the oft-told tale of change and decline. The life story paused as diatribe took the reins: no one learns Latin and Greek properly any more, literary theory is the devil's encroachment which divides men from their texts. Secondary literature piles on secondary literature to become tertiary literature. The good old texts lie abject and invisible at the bottom of the pile. For those who don't know the plot, this is a much-repeated argument at the heart of classics at the moment, in both educational and research forums. But the funny thing is that this kind of 'no one makes classics like they used to' sentiment is more often tied to the Oxford camp in the Oxford/Cambridge classical conflict (over-simplistic, but active nevertheless). This daring old gent was performing a bit of theory-bashing not just anywhere, but at one of the world centres for new theoretical approaches to the classics. The wind had changed since the glory days, when this guy was calling the professorial shots from his heavy chair; and he played to this change. Hats off, Gramps.

What depressed me was not the conservatism during the talk, but the interchange in 'question time' afterwards. The old Don had audaciously thrown his cards on the table, and he wanted to get a rise in return. In the customary silence that follows after the floor has been opened up to questions, as audience members tentatively think about their first move, he explicitly said: 'Come on, someone destroy me.' It was clear that this octogenarian still had a healthy appetite for debate, and he wanted a feed. But no one gave him anything. No one seized on his points with any of the ardour for contradiction and challenge I'd seen directed at middle-age scholars in the 'normal' seminar so far. No one engaged. There seemed general agreement in the room that he had passed beyond the point of force to be reckoned with. Go easy, spoke the silence: he's a relic from a forgotten time. Gloves on, this one's particularly delicate. People opted for safety over controversy: tell us about the time you went to Mt. Athos in 1951, tell us about your trip to post-war Yugoslavia, tell us about your school days. It smacked of policy of appeasement. A friend once pointed out to me that our generation always wants to ask their grandparents about the war. I too have unexceptionally asked my Grandpa about the war, but I remember the sad process of pity that went through my mind before I did it: I was asking not because I wanted to hear all that much, but because I thought he wanted to tell me. That's what it felt like today. Younguns and middle-agers condescendingly giving Grandpa the floor while they think about dinner.

Slightly more depressing, however, was what came out in response to these anodyne questions. Reading an essay, he had managed fine; but improvising, the old-man speak could no longer be concealed. The digressions ranged far and wide, all expanded into the most tedious detail. I can't remember the intricate sequence leading up to it, but he somehow arrived at the topic of the changes in the girls' uniform while he was at school. He quite literally delivered a five minute excursus on the subject. When talking of an ancient trip to Greece, he recalled the finer points of border diplomacy, such as the distinctive way the passport was stamped. I was reminded how long any story, even the shortest, can be. I was reminded of my Grandma's injunction to my Grandpa when he starts spontaneously launching into war talk: 'Make it short.' I was reminded, above all, of The Simpsons, when Grandpa Abe recounts a day in his younger life with infuriating specifity (paraphrase): 'On that morning, I got up, and made myself a piece of toast. I set the toaster to three: medium-brown. Then I put an onion on my belt. Everyone was wearing an onion on their belt back then, which was the style at the time.' Thus spirals our nightmare of murky, formless, endless geriatric discourse: a labyrinth of dystopic repetitions from where, we fear, we may never escape.

Is it inevitable? Do you cross the checkpoints of seventy and eighty pre-marked to harp on, more and more, about decline outside, while your body accelerates its own inside decline? Does the ability to tell stories of socially acceptable length and form fade to black? I struggle to tell socially acceptable stories at twenty-three (a bad test-case): but what about the seasoned raconteur? Will you fall into a digressive mush without the consolation of even knowing you're there? Will the right-minded adults around keep you in the bubble, never pricking you out with a candid 'You're being boring and irrelevant'? The archetypal patterns of old-age suggest gloom. We get the verb 'Nestorise' (at least I've heard it used...) from the first old man in literature: King Nestor in the Iliad. He's the first man on record to say 'In the olden days...'. I'm all for limiting comparisons to the ancient world. But in this case, it's safe to say that the genre of grumpiness has evolved little in three thousand years.

Ageing per se doesn't bother me: but predestination does. The idea of slowly, obliviously sinking into a type, like slipping gradually into a bath prepared at birth and kept warm until you're ready - that, if anything, makes my skin crawl. I console myself by silent oaths: I will remember Nestor, I will remember the professor of the bushy brow. But I won't. Memories will stop effacing age, and begin to create it. In Nestor's place will be remembered the sharp, context-less vision of an onion on a belt or a stamp on a passport. Soon after the fragments themselves will fade...

...nor the years condemn...

Monday, November 3, 2008

Weather: 'Tis nobler in the mind

My girlfriend just told me, with no slim justification, that I should shut up already about the weather. Ever-resembling the sulky school child, I have swallowed the rage, and will now blog about it. Having trouble keeping the younglings under control mum? Get them a blog!

I promise not to labour tedious comparisons or make banal observations, right after this one: the weather at present is shite. With the death of daylight saving, winter seems to have found its cue. The days now end at four, but rarely even begin: for the grey cabinet has no edges when you're stuck inside it. You search the sky's zones for a bit of strong sun, the kind that would, in Sydney, take 0.1 seconds to score a few letters on your retina: 'Sun waz 'ere, 08'. But all you get is drizzle; light, middling, freckly drizzle. Snoop-Dog, the sonic effects you pioneered with your 'drizzle''s are beyond reproach. But did the pathetic image of the sun-starved lad occur to you mid-composition? No, only the Californian climate could give rise to such happy-go-lucky word play. I'm loath to call you a faker, but you really don't know shit about the drizzle.

All this talk about weather has made me think about why there is...all this talk about weather. That is, why 'weather' ever became the paradigmatic 'lowest common denominator' topic. Surely there are better opening remarks available on the conversational market. Weather is immediate and universal, sure. But so are many things: buildings, cars, food, sex, clothes, the Simpsons. Or so I thought.

When I really racked my brain for alternatives, however, I couldn't come up with anything that even nearly approached current climatic patterns as a topic of absolute, blanket relevance. Four years ago now, almost to the day (sorry, temporal specificity is a price I'm having to pay more and more for writing an essay on (that is, concerning, but hopefully the other sense will apply as well) time), I was staying in Northern Italy with some family friends who couldn't speak a word of English. This was good for my Italian, which reached a novice level of competence during this period - but it was also incredibly frustrating. I can't stand cultural and linguistic barriers. They make me highly uneasy and embarrassed. It's one thing to travel independently in a country where you have little to none of the language, hopping along the tourist infrastructure (hostels, common tourist attractions etc). Commercial imperatives made this kind of thing easy a long time ago. But it's a whole different game to take part in a domestic environment. The potential for mix-up and miscommunication increases exponentially. Not only are you a burden on someone else's resources, but you're a burden on their mind: every communicative transaction is a strain. Politeness dictated that I really should have learned Italian.

Where has the weather gone? Well, it was with me then. The universality of weather-talk was institutionalised so deeply that it even filtered into the very early lessons of my thumbed pocket-book, 'Teach Yourself Italian'. A few pages in appeared the deceptively neutral phrase 'fa freddo' (it's cold), along with useful permutations ('fa molto freddo' - it's very cold). It was indeed cold at this time, coming swiftly up to high winter; so the phrase was at least accurate at base level. But it was so much more than this. For me and my equally Anglophone friend, it was the greatest linguistic blessing this side of Latin. I'd never realised before that week in just how many ways 'it's cold' could be deployed. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, conversation would gently pivot around the temperature. It was fun because you knew the domain: a familiar island within a vast, confusing sea. Iteration is always comforting, but no less in a foreign country, where the range of iterable things is severely reduced: 'Oh, we're doing the "it's cold" thing again are we? Brilliant, that I can do!' If adventurous, you could even stick a negative in there: 'it's not cold'. Woah, slow down there Jimmy.

One of the great things about the weather is that it's a never-ending story that can be tapped into at will: by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Constant changes beg for constantly updated comments. 'It's good, it's bad, it's hot, it's cold, it's dry, it's wet, it's typical, it's strange' - the pleasure we get from the behaviour of weather over time, repeatedly meeting and defeating our expectations, is almost analagous to the pleasure of narrative. Weather can do funny (the funniest) things, and the fact that it can still surprise us, after all these years of humanity, and more years of atmosphere, I find inexplicably marvellous. When all is said and done, when books written, films made, files created are finally erased from this fragile planet, the weather - nature's wonder-text - will still be there to entertain. And maybe, in some form, we'll still be there to talk about it.