Thursday 14 April 2011

London's Official British 10K Cattle Herd

Horses and helmets and bugles and plumes. All of which I am allergic to.


If you can be bothered looking at the updates at the Britishest of British runs website, you can find out all about the atrocity to come. It isn't like this comes as a surprise, but it certainly makes me less and less comfortable with the whole idea. I aim to bring some proper non-British peasant food to educate the bejeweled guests of the Ritz with. Perogies! Cheap, buttery, delicious, and conveniently mushy, so they'll squish nicely into my pockets.

I need to come clean about something, though. The money you are donating to Brain Tumour UK on my behalf is not really going to the charity. In fact, all of the participating charities in this event are actually just paying their runners for the humiliation they have to endure as they shuffle along a route featuring the World's Most Famous Everything in this Great Historic City. Shuffle and shuffle, all 25,000 of them, and in various stages of undress. 

So cough it up. You get to laugh, I get to be potentially trampled in a stampede of sticky bodies and a lot of halitosis, and Brain Tumour UK gets a little bit of cash to put towards researching the neurological problems of the people who invented mass running races. There is no cure. But you can help. Give us your monies. I'm currently at 47% of my target amount.


And to more or less quote Sarah, in Labyrinth, as she tries to escape the clutches of Jareth the Goblin King (aka David Bowie):


Somebody save me! Somebody take me away from this horrible place!

Sometimes I feel like a plastic bag, but if Katy Perry assures me that I am a firework, then baby, I am.





The Making of a Moron

Now that it is mid-April and there is warmer air to run in, I have left the hamster wheel and relocated to the ring of red pavement outside. Running round and round in circles without the glaring screens of daytime television, I feel lonely and realise how much I took those screens for granted. I had something to look at and be furious with. And now, out in the fresh air, surrounded by real oxygen and shrubbery and grass full of tiny daisies and the top of the Waltham Forest Town Hall clock peeping up over the trees, I want to just sit down and have a little picnic, because it would be something to do and it's so nice outside. Ah, clarity, elation, blank mind, boredom, idiocy.


In other words, just when I thought the environment of the hamster wheel was sucking my soul out, I discover that the intense boredom of running round n round n round n round the track may be the end of me. Not only do I have to carry my full body weight without mechanical intervention, and I have to actually propel myself forwards using only my own strength, I now get bored and can't always come up with enough angry thoughts to motivate my scurrying. Could it be that I need television to make me angry, which in turn fuels the running? A rotten carrot to chase? I can't think about politics because I would end up shredding the metal fence, thus rendering my entire physical being useless. And I can't think about skool or I'll sit down and cry. And thinking about my brain is not a reliable option either, for the track is not the place for metacognitive speculations. That would lead me into a mysterious metaphysical mist and transport me into a distant dimension.

. . . where I would have . . . no . . . thoughts . . . ?  


Perhaps that is what is happening. It's a matter of dimensions and displacement. I have nothing to think about except thinking about a lack of a things to think about (for 'think' read 'rant'). Although oddly enough, I am more vacant when donning my sports attire and not having a television nearby, which is a rather counter-intuitive thought considering what we know about the matrices between vacant minds, muscle fanatics, television, passive consumption, obesity, wait what is going on here. What I need is something to make horrible judgments and criticisms about. There is no such thing as ethical fuel consumption, and fierce hatred of everything that exists is mine.

I do not profess to know what it is I am talking about at all. All I can say is that that machine has been my scapegoat for all the tar I harbour inside of late, including the parasite. And having achieved clarity, elation, blank mind, boredom, and idiocy by running free in the wilds behind Waltham Forest Town Hall rather than in the slippery and sour confines of the gym, I am an empty vessel. But a television at this point might fill me with further emptiness rather than anger. I am now developing the fear. I can never enter that gym again. I'm going to have to acquire an entire set of resistance machines and free weights and assemble it all in my flat. Does anyone have these? We could could be Oh So Pretty together.

Monday 4 April 2011

Ring Ring


Wait a minute ... didn't people used to have things like this in their homes? They are objects that I dearly miss. And cuz I'm all retro-chic and stuff, I think I'll start carrying one around with me in public, or maybe strap it to my head so I can be, like, hands-free and all. People will be like, wow, she's like, so old-skool, as they fondle the smooth curves of their iPhone and send yet another microwave message (aka txt) out into the atmosphere. What can I say? Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner. Har har har, SAR, SAR, SAR.