6769/19689
A fairly last minute decision was made for the kids to spend the day and the night with their grandparents, which left us able to enjoy a day of peace and quiet and yearning and missing the kids. The peace made me both happy and relaxed and miserable and on edge, We’d been gifted time, we’d been robbed of a day in the company of the greatest idiots on earth.
On balance, it was a good thing. We read books in the sunshine. I didn’t bother putting on sun cream til too late and got pink arms, I drank a pretend beer and half watched the football on my phone.
I did a brisk 6km run in the morning and it felt fluid and easy and I felt like I could easily have turned left rather than right near the end and turned it into a 10km run. I sweated, but the sweat didn’t stink like a cabbage patch, Someone suggested that the sweat smell might be down to eating certain vegetables. But I am not giving up broccoli for anyone.
The half bollocks half marathon totaliser has already topped £4000. It’s got to get to five figures, but I wonder if I can get it to six. If I die on the run I will be disappointed if it doesn’t make seven.
In the evening I thought I’d have a quick look at how the other football match was going. I turned on to see the crowd looking very nervous and some people seemingly in tears and I initially thought - blimey, it’s just a game, grow up. Luckily I didn’t tweet that and it became apparent very quickly that something genuinely serious and horrific was going on. And for some reason the people filming the event weren’t pulling away from showing the horror - the player that was down was surrounded by his team mates, but was clearly convulsing and in serious trouble. Or beyond serious trouble.
Thankfully Christian Eriksen has survived, thanks to the quick actions of his team mates and the match officials and remarkably the match was completed later on, when it had felt for a time like all football should stop for a considerable time.
I don’t think any of us needed a reminder of the fragility of life and had maybe hoped that watching a football match would be an escape from the ever present march of death and confronting our mortality. But though the TV coverage was misjudged, the reaction of the players and the fans was incredible. And I felt even more stupid for my initial reaction. Even if people had been feeling upset because their side had missed a penalty or whatever, emotion should not be trivialised. Having strong feelings for a football team that you’re not even playing in is no different than thinking liking the music of a pop band you’re not in somehow defines your own personality.
We watched a somewhat one sided documentary about UFOs that seemed to have enough compelling evidence to not have to be quite so partisan and to allow some dissenting voices. Still UFOS are fun and maybe there are aliens visiting us, though, as my wife pointed out, why do they make themselves so apparent and then seemingly nearly always get really scared when people actually encounter them? Shit, they’ve seen us in our highly visible disc with lights and stuff all over it. Let’s got out of here.
The stuff about the nuclear bases was good though.
