Goodbye Galway…
Ah Jeezis, Galway was beautiful yesterday morning as I was leaving it. Why is it that you can only appreciate something intensely in the moments just before it’s out of your grasp?
The streets had that Sunday morning air of abandonment, a stark contrast to the night before, where throngs of drunken, belligerent, scantily clad females paraded around with gaping pizza boxes and mouths full of chips and curry sauce…
I was desperately trying to stop time and stay in the moment but as soon as you realise you’re clinging, you’ve already suffocated it and I was soon on my way to the airport. It was too late then, i had to let go; the scenery was already whizzing past the car window and everything started to speed up.
The delightful Corrib River…
The knuckle-chewer…
We stumbled into a late night bar there in Galway last night.
As we were horsing the pints into us, we started to become aware of an ol’ fella walking around the bar; observing him was better than watching any TV programme. He was interesting because he was in his own world – a world where it seemed no one else existed… and he was up to something.
He had a kind of a 70’s bouffant hairstyle and wore a battered black tracksuit jacket over an old fashioned pair of trousers.
We watched him go up to the counter and order a pint of Smithwicks but then cancelled the order upon counting his coins – He was obviously a few coins short of the price of a pint; literally and metaphorically.
He proceeded to circle the bar for the next ten minutes, looking at the ground. He must have been looking for coins, we thought…
We planted two euro coins under the hat stand and sat back in our seats waiting for him to come around again. It was all very exciting.
He came around the corner a couple of minutes later and shuffled past the coat stand and then stopped. His beady eyes spotted the euros and we watched him bend down to pick them up.
With his pockets jangling, he took the quickest route to the bar and got himself a pint of Smithwicks. He seemed satisfied… for a while.
When he got halfway down his pint, he started acting a little strange; talking to himself at first and then graduating to some knuckle chewing. He then put his hand around his mouth as if to silence himself, but it was as if his hand belonged to someone else. I think he had some foes in his head who were giving him a serious talking to.
The more he drank, the more he seemed to wrestle with himself and I came away realising that life is exactly as it should be and I felt somewhat guilty for interfering with his fate…
Injury feels as though it’s healing…
For those of you out there who have no interest in running, you’re probably finding my blogs very boring lately… maybe you have always found them boring and you’re just humouring me by reading them… who knows. I will continue typing anyway…
I just wanted to share my hope with you y’see.
My newfound hope that I may be running again soon! My shin splints (self diagnosed with the help of google) seems to be healing. I am lucky in the sense that the shin splints were like a delayed effect and came on the day after a run. So I have never actually been running with the injury or through the injury as I know some people do. I haven’t ran since the injury, allowing it the time to heal. It was hard not to, but I had to keep reminding myself to listen to my body. I had to summon up the physiotherapist in me and adhere to the advice. Now if this persists, I am going to have to visit a physio but I am going to see if it will heal by itself first.
I did go to the gym and did 40 minutes on that elliptical trainer thing I spoke about in a previous blog. I also did my usual 17 mile cycle and did the ‘climbing stairs machine’ in the gym also, all of which didn’t aggravate my injury. The only thing that seems to aggravate it is the motion of walking and the contact my foot has with the ground, so running is out of the question. Walking is being introduced gradually and today it feels a lot stronger.
When I did my running plan, I added in an extra two weeks in the event of injury or say, if I got swine flu or something that would prevent me from running. So, I do have up to two weeks to rest without jeopardizing my training.
If it heals, I will start running again on grass or preferably sand. I am off to Galway tomorrow for a couple of months. I am sure there will be a beach there I can run on that will lessen the impact.
It’s funny but when you have been enjoying doing something for a long time, like running and it suddenly becomes a forbidden activity, you start to become a little obsessive about it. I find myself rubbernecking when joggers pass me by and then filling up with envy.
I have got to get back out there soon and I have got to run in the Dublin City Marathon.
Fingers and toes and shin splints crossed.
Marathon Training Update – Shin Splints
I’m doing my absolute nut these days…
I’ve been doing great with my training and for the last ten weeks I’ve been slowly building to my peak which was a sixteen mile run on Thursday. I did it in good time so was in great spirits altogether.
The run itself was hard work definitely and I felt where my weaknesses were by the end of it. It was the first run in my training programme that actually had me aching after it. I was also aware of the need to be more toned up and well compacted in the abs/core area and made a pact with myself to really strengthen up in that respect.
Then on Sunday, I did a four-miler on the treadmill to give my joints a rest from the concrete. I like to combine the two, keeping the treadmill for short runs and while doing so, try and push myself a bit on time. Anyway, On Monday I woke up to my worst nightmare… the dreaded shin splints. Now I don’t know if it is shin splints, I kinda diagnosed myself.
Shin Splints cover a range of different injuries in and around the shin bone and the surrounding muscles. From my google self diagnosis, I know the pain is in my Tibial anterior muscle:
The most painful bit is that part that kinda narrows down as it reaches the ankle. I can’t walk on it for long without it becoming painful. The part where I have to lift my foot up to take another step is the tricky bit and then my foot sort of stomps down. Banjaxed.
I can cycle fine, though I had the misfortune of getting a puncture on my way to work and had to walk with the shin splints and my punctured bike for about two miles. We were like a double act, the bike and me and I was in agony by the time I got to work. I haven’t run since Sunday and it is killing me to abstain. I can’t figure out which is worse, the actual injury or having to stop training.
If it persists, I am hoping to see a physio. I am going to the gym this evening to do some leg presses and use that elliptical trainer thingy and see if I can do some strengthening exercises:
(That’s not me on it by the way! ha! no, I haven’t changed race)
I really hope this is a short term thing and that I can get back into training soon…
Builders Bum…
I just saw a fella at work bend over to study the labels of boxes that were stacked on the ground.
He was down there for a while cuz he needed to do a bit of rummaging.
He had a classic case of builders bum.
In all seriousness, isn’t it great that we have introduced the wearing of clothing as an enforsed law?
Imagine how horrific everyday activities would be, if we didn’t wear clothes;
simple things like running down the stairs or being in a crowded train or eating your sandwiches…
Doesn’t bear thinking about…
Born into a pack of ginger nuts…
I have just been chinwagging for the last hour about twins.
I never knew that identical twins were created from the same egg which then divides into two. I felt like a bit of a moron when I revealed that ignorant nugget of information about myself in the midst of the flow of conversation. I don’t really know how I thought they were created. I think it’s amazing now that I’ve been educated about it and I will be smiling to myself in my knowledge when I see a pair of them next.
I wonder if my ignorance is due to the fact that I went to a convent school…
The nuns never told us anything about the birds and the bees now that I think of it. My parents never said a word about it either. I just kinda found out myself ha! – I would have preferred it that way anyway because I would have died of embarrassment…
Anyway the conversation sort of went off in a tangent and we wound up talking about foxy haired people.
I have been informed that they’re ‘dying out’.
I come from a family of six fine foxy haired red blooded Irish creatures, complete with white eyebrows and freckles, the lot of them. I was born with jet black hair then, slap bang in the middle of all the ginger nuts. They called me the postmans daughter. No one ever knew me as a Walsh, it was great, I could get away with murder.
One day, waaaaaaaay back when Taytos were only 9p, I was walking down the road with the ginger nuts. It was a beautiful Summers day, I remember it well and we heading to a pool in the rocks where we used to swim. An american couple passed by in the car anyway, stopped suddenly, then quickly reversed. All I heard was “aoh my god, look at their hair! – Oh wow! freckles too!!!” as they jumped out with a camera. They asked us all to sit up on the gate and pose for a picture. I was asked to step aside out of the picture and that they’d take one of me on my own later, as she wanted to get a picture of the ginger nuts together.
She proceeded to take a number of photos of all the foxy ones and then she jumped into her car and sped off! [insert violin music here]…
The Stolen Child…
WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
William Butler Yeats.
I invented something AMAZING in my dream!
God, I’m a genius. I actually INVENTED something really amazing in my dream last night.
I hope it’s not one of those things that I am the only one who thinks it’s amazing… and then when I tell someone, they think it’s not only weird but really stupid.
Let me tell you it anyway and you can tell me what you think… I was going to patent the idea and bring it to the Dragons Den, but it would cost me a fortune in concrete to actually make it.
Here it is anyway, in a nut shell.
It all came from my subconscious genius-of-a-mind don’t forget…
It’s going to be really hard now to translate it into words as I just saw images of it in my dream…
Right, so… em…
Ok…
Well basically it’s made from concrete. If that’s not feasible, then fake concrete may suffice and may be the better choice for emergency reasons (this will make sense later).
Right, what you do is, build a MASSIVE block of concrete, like about the size of a twelve story apartment block. There is only one entrance and one exit to the concrete mass and in between is a kind of maze, similar to that of an ant farm…
But should be as complicated as this:
The narrow burrows should only fit one human being with enough space to maybe scratch themselves if needs be. The burrow should not be wide enough for them to be able to give up and turn around and pull themselves back out. The reason being, that once you enter, there is no wimping out. This teaches the individual the all important lesson of sticking to an important decision… a lesson in strength of mind.
Method of travelling through the burrow is by pulling your body, worm like through the maze. Elbow pads would be supplied free of charge to anyone willing to partake. Tunnels may be fitted with a sort of mechanism that doesn’t allow you to go backwards even if you tried.
Some tunnels/burrows may lead to a dead end; where this is the case, the tunnel would not have the mechanisms that prevent you from turning back (otherwise I’d be done for manslaughter). The idea behind these traps are again, for building up strength of mind and for teaching people to relax and focus under extreme pressure.
I think that these human concrete ant-hill mazes would be great in amusement parks or maybe army training camps or even boot camps for delinquent adolescents.
If someone does have a heart-attack in the middle of the concrete maze, there is an emergency procedure whereby the building can be pulled out in four parts and the person can be plucked from the maze and treated.
Under no circumstances is the person allowed to be removed from the maze however. They must continue on after receiving medical assistance.
These human concrete ant-hill mazes can be a wonderful way to raise money for charity. People would be sponsored to partake in it and spectators could come and watch the concrete while they are inside trying to get out.
There could be an opportunity for further developments to the idea in so far as, the outside could be fitted with glass whereby the spectator could see the individual struggling within but the individual could not see out.
For even more fun, you could add another element. If the person doesn’t make it out by 5pm, then they get locked in the maze overnight! The exit would be bolted shut like….
So what do you think then?
They look interested to me!!!
YES!
Willie’s Chocolate bars are really…
I wrote a blog before about Willie Harcourt-Cooze and I slated him. Well I kinda take that back now… because I went to Selfridges one day a few months ago and I saw his chocolate bar for sale.
I proceeded to purchase it for a whopping…
When I got into the bus, I felt the urge. I took it out of my bag and had a little look at what all the fuss was about.
Nice packaging.
Nice logo.
Nice little note underneath the seal, telling me to ‘tuck in’…
Two slabs of chocolate wrapped in gold…
I put it back in my bag.
It was far too fancy to eat on the bus.
Eating a bar of this caliber required a bit of fuss. I needed a cup of tea and a comfortable seat. I needed to put my feet up. I needed a few cushions. I needed a punkah wallah. I needed… well, i just needed to get off the smelly bus so I could really savour these glorious looking chocolate slabs of delight that lay seductively before me…
When I got home and made myself comfortable, I tucked in to what is now, most definitely my favourite chocolate on the planet.
The texture is like, sort of harder than fudge but the same kind of soft quality to it, your teeth sink into it. It’s not like all those plasticky type dark chocolates on the market that make that cheap ’snap’ noise when you crack a piece off…
The taste is so rich and tangy. It boasts of subtle tropical fruit tones, and it delivers them with every bite. The after taste has a zing too and you just have to wait before taking the next bite because the experience continues on in your mouth after…
It was so good, I had to buy two more today!
