The running tracks of my life

In the past few weeks I have been getting to know the third significant athletics track of my lifetime.

*

The first was the lumpy gravel loop that Maidenhead AC calls home, situated in a cluster of rugby pitches just a gentle breeze from the Braywick sewage works. Having moved on to pastures new, I now resent the joint-pounding hardness of the rutted home straight, the lack of grip and the horrific damage the cinder does to a pair of spikes, but without it I would never even have had the choice to take up sprinting. The next closest track is Eton and my parents didn’t have the time to take me what with two other boys with commitments and passions of their own to raise. I am grateful for its existence, but that doesn’t save it from holding the title of Comfortably the Worst Track I Have Ever Run On by Miles.

Note the puddles. Note the uneven surface. Note the colour.

One solitary floodlight, barely above head-height, is tasked every Tuesday evening with lighting the whole track, a task at which it fails admirably. Three sides of the track are shrouded in gloom for the entirety of winter, rendering sprinting impossible. Distance runners, seemingly unaware of the existence of the peculiar creature known as a “sprinter”, meander all over the place and dodging them without anything but the faintest illumination is all but impossible.

Too poor to ever lay a tartan track, in a futile yearly attempt at respectability every summer the council would paint wiggly white lines on the track, y’know, in an attempt to disguise it as a normal running track. Within weeks the white paint would be scattered and dispersed by a combination of the footfalls of Nike-shod runners and the ever-dependable British weather. It was about as effective as painting sand at low-tide. Not only that, but the Maidenhead track is the only one I’ve ever seen that has an eight-lane home straight, a seven-lane top bend, and six lanes for the second 200m. It’s also 440 yards. It’s that old.

For some reason, it’s not a place that I associate with good weather. I can remember times that it has been nice – one Easter it was so hot I trained shirtless – but owing to training mostly coming to a halt when school finished the scorching mornings and glorious warm evenings spent on the Southampton track are slower to come to mind than winter dreariness and three-minute runs.

The saving grace is the people. There’s a great little community of dedicated athletes and coaches and since I started there a decade or more ago the junior section has grown massively thanks entirely to their commitment. I reckon I’ll try and do the same when I’m a bit older.

*

In comparison to Maidenhead, running on the Southampton track was like running on a red carpet. A close-up: the foot comes down, spikes dig and grip, rubber compresses minutely under pressure, stored energy, the rebound. Repeat ad infinitum. A world away from slap-and-slip Maidenhead.

One of the feelings I most associate with the Southampton track is freedom. It is literally a big, flat infinite space to run into as fast as I can until I decide to stop. Neither going nor coming, just running. This is true for all running tracks to some extent, but the spacious green geography of the Southampton Sports Centre and its role as shelter from pressures of academic university life intensify this feeling in me. We dealt with some grim weather over the three years I trained in Southampton, but as I mentioned before, the sunny spells linger in the memory moreso than the storms. When it’s hot it’s almost like a dare: I’ve done your warm-up for you, now run fast. And then when you’re spent the warmth and sponginess of the track will afford you a lie-down.

Come at me, bro

But with pleasure comes pain, and with a greater level of dedication to my running, the Southampton track at times began to resemble a place of self-imposed torture. That’s barely an exaggeration. The sensation you find at the lowest, deepest fire-(or tartan?)red circles of fatigue is one of being wasted, if being drunk was agony. You can barely think, and you certainly can’t walk, not for a while at least. Not until your stomach is heaved empty. Eh. Worth it.

I should also stress the amount of time I spent on the Southampton track. A rough estimate points to about 700 hours over 2 ¾ years, which actually doesn’t sound like that much to me, but I guess when you think that’s 700 hours, or a solid month of intense exercise it starts to make sense. A significant chunk of my life has been spent there with a slowly shifting group of like-minded people who have become some of my closest friends. I’ve written about this bond before. Then I graduated.

*

The autumn just gone I ended up back at the deserted Maidenhead track for two months, training alone. A regression in lifestyle, a regression in running surface. Without a car I had no choice – Eton was too far to cycle. Eventually, though, I got a temp job in Slough and with it enough money to afford car insurance.

The Eton track, owned by the school but open to the public, is enclosed entirely by trees, tightly enough that it is scattered with fallen leaves and twigs. The trees serve to keep the wind at bay, mostly, so the place feels quiet, hushed, collegiate; this in contrast with exposed Southampton and its gale-force headwinds. One evening a few weeks ago a thick fog rolled in, so dense that visibility was around 50m. There were few people there that night, so every now and again a jogger would loom out of the mist, whiz by before being swallowed again. Surreal. The expensive stands enclose a gym, sauna, decent changing rooms and, best of all, a rubberised indoor 60m straight.

And the track. Oh my.

It was re-laid in early autumn and it is perfect. Southampton’s feels dead in comparison. I float. You float. We float.

Even before training here regularly Eton was my third most-visited track, owing to all the district inter-school athletics events held there. These were some of the best days of my school life, and not just because I nearly always won, but also because of proper team spirit and the dependable good weather. Our relay team also wiped the floor with every other school in the district.

*

Tomorrow after work I meet up with some of the Windsor Slough Eton & Hounslow sprint coaches with the hope of finding a group to train with for the first time since June. Chapter three!

Little Red Yaris

Little Red Yaris,

You would be black and blue if I asked you

To take me to Paris.

Not that I'd want you to.

A England team with an identity

The needle has swung wildly in the opposite direction. In 2006, the England team was packed full of stars, men like Stevie and Frank and Wayne and Ashley and EBJT, all in their Champions League-troubling glory, and England expected. We had a great collection of players, we really did. Of course, things didn’t go according to plan. We struggled to score goals and went out on penalties in the quarter-finals to baby-Cristiano Ronaldo’s team of Portugeezers (which is not actually that bad, really).

Then came the recriminations. Overrated bollocks! shouted the papers. Pampered millionaires! shouted the rest. And as such, England, as a football-watching collective, went into the 2010 World Cup in Suthifrika with tempered expectations. Gareth Barry was in the midfield along with James Milner, and Heskey was Rooney’s best striking partner.* T’was uninspiring, but at the same time, we still had quite a lot of very good players who turned out regularly for the best teams in the strongest league in the world. Most teams in the tournament could not match that. I don’t blame the personnel, not really.

No, Fabio Capello is the man to blame. Most of England’s best players are all-rounders. The best, Rooney, is an all-rounder. Eight-out-of-tens across the board. Numbers three and four are Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, both of whom are all-rounders. Likewise, seven-to-eight-out-of-ten across the board. A team needs one or two of these players, players that can help out defensively as well as attack, pass, run and fire-fight. Any more than a couple and a team will lack the necessary high-end qualities to get through a tough defence: their roles will be poorly-defined and as a result the team will lack any focal-points. A team needs specialists, like highly mobile players to get in behind, predatory finishers who rely on anticipation and cold-bloodedness or players with outstanding ball-retention. With Rooney, Gerrard, Lampard, Milner (Happy 28th Birthday, James!) and possibly Welbeck when he’s played out wide, England have far too many all-rounders. Of those five, Rooney has to start, and personally I would play Milner on the left to bring some tirelessness to the midfield. Welbeck would be a good replacement, too. The key point is this: there is no space for Gerrard or Lampard, and particularly not both.

I can’t wait for Gerrard and Lampard to retire. They’re still playing frustratingly well at 34 and 35 years old, which makes dropping either of them a seriously tough decision for Woy. Gerrard’s the captain, and still a good player, I can completely understand why Roy persists. He does play well and it can be hard to be overly-critical of his play due to his general competence. Not only that, but he is the captain also – it would take a bold manager to drop his captain entirely from the set-up. Nevertheless, he shouldn’t be in the team.

I have more patience with Lampard who is cleverer and more cunning and could thus play a more advanced role, but he would overlap with Rooney’s skillset and between the two it’s a no-brainer.  

At the moment my team stands thus:

      Hart

Johnson   Terry   Cahill   Baines

        x

x    .

Walcott                           Milner

Rooney      .

                Sturridge 

A quick overview: Hart, obviously; Baines narrowly ahead of Cole; Johnson narrowly ahead of Walker; Terry needs to come out of retirement to partner his club-mate Cahill; Walcott is by far England’s most dangerous wide-player (sorry Andros); Milner is solid and dependable and offers good protection for attack-minded Baines; Rooney and Sturridge pick themselves by being the best two English forwards by a distance, and happily their playing styles are complementary. Pretty good, and nice and balanced, too.

This team has two spaces with which to fill the roles of distributor and defensive midfielder. Gerrard these days likes to be both, and frustratingly Roy is happy to allow him to try. Oh, Roy. Gerrard’s distribution is, it has to be said, very good, but when it comes to soaking up pressure and playing an understated game, he comes up short. For the role of distributor I nominate two players, one of whom is obvious, the other isn’t (unless you know me. Oh yes.)

Michael Carrick

Carrick is a graceful player and a fantastic passer. Is he too old? Probably not. He’ll be just shy of 33 at the start of the World Cup, and for a player in his position requires a lot of jogging but not much sprinting, that’s okay. On the downside, he doesn’t offer much goal threat and isn’t much of a physical presence. I can rarely remember Carrick being assertive, instead doing his best to allow other players to be assertive.  One advantage from Roy’s point of view is that he wouldn’t get much stick if things went wrong; Carrick is a safe choice. He’s not my first choice distributor though.

Tom Huddlestone

Hudd absolutely smashed Fulham the other day and for the first time I can remember, large-scale debate has sprung up around his ability and his potential suitability for England. Don’t worry, I’m not being swept along on a wave of hype, I’ve been advocating Thudd’s inclusion for years. He’s similar to Carrick in many ways, but has even better vision and is more technically adept. He wasn’t at his best last season but even then he would be subbed on early in the second half and would quietly set about changing the game, out-passing the opposition midfield and bringing wide players in with unerring cross-field passes, snappy balls into feet and weighted through-balls. Willing runners such as Walcott and Sturridge would thrive with his service, and his ability to thread a ball into an advanced player’s (Rooney’s) feet in tight areas would no-doubt prove effective.

Assessments of Huddlestone’s time at Spurs that he slowed play down are wide of the mark (it’s not about how fast you can run, but how fast you can play the ball. No issue there), but his lack of pace means he gets bypassed easily and doesn’t have much bite in the tackle. In fact, despite his size, he doesn’t throw his weight around much.

A further downside is that he is mostly an unknown quantity at international level with just four caps against crap teams, and to install him in the starting XI would be seen as a huge risk by the press.

If Thudd is to be the creative hub of this England team he needs someone to help him defend. The requirements are: good defensive positioning, energy, physicality, strong link-up play. There are a few candidates.

Realistic choices

Jordan Henderson

 He’s surprised everyone by being quite brilliant for Liverpool this year, marrying dynamism with guile. Not having seen Liverpool play many full matches I’m not really qualified to comment on his defensive ability, though. Sorry.

Jack Wilshere

Pretty similar to Jordan Henderson in many ways, I’m not entirely sold on his defensive ability either.

Phil Jones

This is the one, I think. The lad can defend, no doubt. He’s good enough on the ball to work as a double-pivot (someone’s been reading Inverting the Pyramid) and take the play forward himself as well as being tactically astute enough to let Hudd dictate the play. I’m on to something here.

Tom Cleverley

I seemed to be the only one who thought Cleverley put in a decent performance against Germany a few months ago. He was diligent in defence covered for Gerrard well. Essentially, he does what Phil Jones does, but not as well.

Left-field choices

Lee Cattermole

Cattermole is a prick that no one likes and often he seems to prefer injuring people than playing football. However, in a reducer role he’s really quite effective and is the kind of mad bastard that would complement Huddlestone's more cerebral style.

RAF Captain Scott Parker

He’s played alongside Thudd at Spurs quite successfully, but he’s been short of his 2011 hey-day for a while now. RAF Captain Scott Parker is made of gristle and English pride and as long as he follows the instruction of ‘pass it to Tom’ and he could probably do a decent job.

Jack Rodwell

Is Jack will broken? I’ve lost track. He’s got the potential to be great but he hasn’t got the consistency and isn’t playing regular football.

So there is it – my ideal XI

Hart

Johnson   Terry   Cahill   Baines

        Jones

Huddlestone    .

Walcott                           Milner

Rooney      .

                Sturridge 

Subs from: Forster, Ruddy; Walker, Cole, Jagielka, Smalling; Carrick, Wilshere, Townsend, Barkley; Welbeck, Rodriguez

I'm pretty happy with that. It's got satisfactory cover for every position except maybe Jones. Rodriguez could be dropped for Andy Carroll if he ever gets back to full fitness, but I don't really feel a big lump up front these days. It's a shame to leave out both Henderson and Cleverley, but that would re-introduce the all-rounder issue so it has to be done.

Flaws in this team: Hudd's good but he's not invincible. This team could get overrun in the middle by Spain or Germany. It would work well on the counter-attack, with Jones able to bomb on ahead. Alternatively, Sturridge would be replaced by Rooney who would play the lone striker, with an extra man added to mid-field - Jack Wilshere would be my go-to man owing to his ball retention and skill in tight areas.

On tiredness

I'm so tired

I'm so tired of filmspeak

            And of ‘problematic’ and ‘why it works’ and capslock titles

I'm so tired of Twitter

            And the over-saturation of Opinion

            And self-importance

            And Twitter comedians whose jokes block out the sun

I'm so tired of the gender debate

            And of bland busybodies who think articles can ever be a tipping point

            And the mis-use of ‘troll’

            And people going on about Blurred Lines like it's the worst thing.

I'm so tired of alcohol culture

            And recriminations

I'm so tired of Cambridge comedians

I'm so tired of my security blanket being a smarter financial choice than going it alone

I'm so tired of feeling impotent anger

            And seeing political apathy amongst my peers

[REDACTED]

The football’s still pretty good, though.

Language Dilution is a Crime

Language dilution, language pollution: pick your term. For too long this practice has gone on unchecked, unabated, laying waste to our precious words, our finest finite natural resource. It has many learned defenders who cry ‘language drift!’ arm-in-arm with the less learned who cry in turn, ‘who gives a shit!’. Fools.[i]

No, it is not language drift, it is laziness.

As well as the obvious meaning, Google gives a definition of ‘literally’ as a word that can be “used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling.”[ii] I weep. Google, the arbiter of knowledge, has metaphorically caved in, figuratively given up the fight, and literally offended me.

But it isn't Mr. Google’s fault, nor is it the OED’s or any other organisation like that. Nope, it is your fault, dear reader, if you have ever used literally when you don’t literally mean it. Dictionaries do not set language, they document it: Fiona MacPherson of the OED says, “If enough people use a word in a particular way […] it will find its way into the dictionary.”

Using literally when you don’t literally mean literally is language abuse, not language drift. Wikipedia lists the reasons for language change as:

a)      Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.

a.       the principle of least effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms (going to > gonna)

b)      Analogy: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.

c)       Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from foreign languages.

d)      Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.

e)      Migration/Movement: Speakers will change and create languages, such as pidgins and creoles

I am fine, for instance, with the way my generation uses the word ‘like’ all the time as a way of introducing reported speech because it is a shorter and more fluid way of saying ‘he/she said’ and makes it clear you are paraphrasing, or giving the gist of what somebody else said. ‘Like’ is also used as a filler word, and that’s fine too. In general, it’s best to try and remove fillers from your speech, because they make you sound less intelligent and confident, but that’s super-difficult so it’s fine, really. I am also fine with people saying ‘PIN number,’ even though technically speaking you are saying ‘personal identification number number’, because I feel PIN itself has come to mean the combination you put into the thing to validate your cashcard.  

I am not fine with people diluting ‘literally’ (and ‘genuinely’, to a lesser extent) because we only have one word for literally, and if literally no longer means literally then we've lost a word, and a useful one at that. If there was a replacement – and I know a lot of former literally-abusers that have moved onto ‘genuinely’, ruining that, too – I possibly would be okay with it. It falls into none of the above categories, and in fact reduces economy. If you use literally when you don’t mean literally, for instance in, ‘omg I literally love Mary Berry,’ you are not only adding an extraneous word, you are also devaluing it, so when the time comes for ‘literally’ to be used in its proper meaning it is no longer up to the task. (I've seen the tragicomedy of ‘literally literally’ before. Again, I weep.) It also raises the issue for serial literally and genuinely abusers that if they make a statement without using one of the two, it could give the impression that they are being insincere.

Parroting a word over and over again in inappropriate contexts robs a word of its power. Take swearing for instance. People that eff and blind as part of their regular speech patterns devalue swearing, so when they’re really angry, they haven’t got the vocabulary to express themselves. When/if I’m a parent, I imagine I would tell my children not to swear unnecessarily, but if they’re really, really angry about something it would be okay. It’s important that we can be rude to each other. It seems strange to me, for instance, that in Australia (and other parts of the world, too), people call each other ‘cunt’ in the same way that I would use the word ‘mate.’ If you really want to call someone a ‘cunt,’ which is just about the worst word we have, what do you do?

So please, put some thought into the words you use because words are vulnerable and synonyms are exhaustible.

---

[i] http://www.buzzfeed.com/billypeltzer/10-crutch-words-you-literally-need-to-stop-saying-ecuv This ‘listicle’ is mostly on the money, and the comments illustrate typical moronic defences perfectly.

[ii] In between starting and finishing this article, Google has CHANGED IT BACK!! Yes!

By Bus

A bead of sweat slowly tumbled down the nape of Mark’s neck, testing his patience. An unexpected Indian summer was inflicting a punishing dry heat on Northern Europe, and waiting at the Southampton Airport Parkway bus stop for an interminable length of time, Mark felt like an ant under a magnifying glass. He forced himself to remain calm as the bead avalanched interminably and excruciatingly past his collar-line. The only other person at the bus stop was a small and frail old lady, leaning on a walking stick with a rucksack hanging off her narrow shoulders. She seemed completely unaffected by the heat. Mark wasn’t sure whether to marvel at her casual stoicism or to feel embarrassed by his relative inability to endure.

Before he could reach a satisfactory conclusion to this problem, the Uni-Link bus arrived and pulled up in front of the pair and the sliding doors huffed open. The elderly lady boarded ahead of Mark, and once he had wrestled his over-stuffed suitcase on-board and bought a single ticket, he found her peering up the stairwell towards the top deck, as if trying to gauge whether the climb was beyond her. The bus lurched into motion and she turned to look at Mark.

                ‘Well, are you going to help me or what!’ she said expectantly, but with a hint of cheekiness that prevented her tone from sliding into impertinence. Mark grunted in assent and heaved his suitcase into the rack, before turning and offering a forearm to the lady, which she grasped lightly. ‘Thank you, my dear. I want to sit at the front. It’s more fun at the front.’ An increasingly bemused Mark guided her up the swaying steps to the front seats of the bus, which afforded a grand panoramic view of the Southampton streets that rushed by on either side. Mark helped her out of her rucksack and she sat down. She seemed pleased, and Mark, unsure as to whether his duties were fulfilled, turned to go.

                ‘So gentlemanly for one so young, thank you my dear.’ She indicated for Mark to sit alongside her. ‘My name is Nancy, but my friends call me Nancy. And how may I address you?’ Mark laughed.

                ‘Mark. My friends call me…Mark.’

                ‘And are you student here, Mark?’

                ‘I am. In fact –’ he said, as the bus rounded the final corner of Wessex Lane, bringing Montefiore Halls into view on the right, ‘– my old room is that one.’ He pointed towards a long but narrow block of flats with a fading, weather-worn façade. ‘Are you?’ Nancy smirked in response. The bus stopped outside Montefiore and a group of Chinese students boarded.

                ‘I was. Of course, this concrete monstrosity that you had the misfortune of calling home did not exist back then. I was a resident of Stoneham House, built in an age where architecture wasn’t dictated by the latest in prison building trends!’ Stoneham House lay across the road from Montefiore, situated with some degree of grandeur in the middle of a few acres of well-cultivated garden. The late-baroque façade was compromised somewhat by the awkward, abandoned overflow accommodation tower that loomed incongruently on the west wing, like a builder that had somehow stumbled into a high-society dinner party.

A group of Chinese pre-sessional students boarded and the bus pulled away. Nancy requested for Mark to open the window for her and he did so. There was a lull in conversation as Nancy tilted her head back and allowed the cooling draft to blow through her hair as the bus barrelled along Burgess Road up towards the university. Noticing the Karrimat strapped to her rucksack, Mark broke the silence.

                ‘What’s with the mat? Are you roughing it?’

                ‘I’m going to Bestival.’

                ‘Bestival?’ Mark repeated incredulously.

                ‘Bestival’.

                ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘I most certainly am not.’ Mark burst out laughing: he couldn’t help himself. Nancy looked peeved. After he had composed himself, Mark continued.

‘Why on earth are you going to Bestival? I don’t think I’m being rude when I say you’re not exactly the typical festival-goer.’

‘Well, perhaps not. I’m going to see Elton John. He’s not playing anywhere else in the UK this year, so this year I’m going to Bestival. We fell in love with him in 1970, Doreen and I, when he released ‘Your Song’ in 1970. You might know it from that film with that handsome Scottish chap. Anyway, we’ve been to see him every year since.’

‘So you’re something of a megafan?’

‘I’m not a lunatic, if that’s what you mean,’ came the defensive reply.

Embarrassed, Mark resumed looking onto the outside world. They were passing through the university campus, all but abandoned in the summer months by the student population. Small groups of parents of prospective students were being shown around campus by enthusiastic student ambassadors wearing brightly coloured t-shirts, while their offspring lagged behind, eyeing each other up. The driver of an oncoming bus threw up a salute as he passed. A crowd of ravens hopped and bickered on what the student population had dubbed the “intercourse” – the strip of grass that separated the bus interchange and the concourse. Nancy drew his attention back into the confines of the bus.

‘You haven’t told me your destination yet.’

                ‘I’m off to the Island, same as you. My eldest sister squeezed out a baby girl two days ago so I’m rushing home for the celebration. Baby Caroline – I’ve only seen heavily pixelated photos so far. I can’t wait to see her. I usually find babies annoying but when it’s a new family member I might be more tolerant.’

                ‘You will adore her, no doubt about it. Your sister and her husband, however, will be driven crazy eventually. There’s a much longer grace period when it’s your own baby. It’s a race to stay sane until they become toddlers, which is when they become lovely again, and develop a personality.’

                ‘I’ll make sure to tell Kate that’ said Mark facetiously. ‘Do you have children of your own, then?’

                ‘No, but I saw enough of Doreen’s to know a bit about them. They were terrors until they were three and a half. Terrors, but she loved them anyway, of course. I helped out when they got a bit much. They turned into little angels almost overnight.’

                ‘Doreen’s your best friend, right?’ Mark ventured.

                ‘Yes. My best and oldest friend. Would you like to see a picture of her?’ Without waiting for a response, Nancy opened her purse and took out a dog-eared and crumpled black-and-white photo. A jaded-looking, post-concert Elton John smiled wearily into the lens of the past, his evident exhaustion contrasting with the exuberant smiles of the two women flanking him. ‘I’m the short, fat one on the right, if you can’t tell. Doreen was always the looker of the two of us. We were devastated when we found out Elton hadn’t much interest in girls! It was taken after a performance at the Royal Albert. Fantastic, he was, and with just a piano, a microphone and a spotlight.’ She broke off to hum a few bars of ‘Your Song’, without very much skill.

‘And you’re meeting her on the Island?’ At this, Nancy shook her head slightly and looked deeply into Mark’s eyes for a moment then back to the photo, but didn’t say anything. The cogs in Mark’s brain clunked. Suddenly it was obvious. ‘Oh! I’m so sorry, I should have realised’. Mark instinctively looked down and fiddled with a button on his coat, uncomfortable with this unexpected revelation and unsure how to act. He reached out and gave Nancy’s fragile hand a squeeze and waited patiently for her to gather herself. She sighed and made a visible effort to shake off her grief by squaring her shoulders, scrunching up her eyes a few times and swallowing to ease out the lump in her throat.

‘She passed two weeks ago, but we already had our tickets by that point, so I decided to come anyway by myself. I think it’s what she would’ve wanted. I’ve got this -’ she waggled the photo, ‘and this!’ she said, pulling out a hip flask. ‘Limoncello!’ she said gleefully. The bus was going past the Common; a trickle of sweaty-shiny joggers flickered in and out of the long shadows cast by the trees lining the footpath. ‘It keeps me young.’ Nancy flipped open the cap and took a slug of the potent yellow ooze, and held the flask out to Mark, who declined.

                ‘No thanks, can’t stand the stuff.’

                ‘You don’t drink? You should, you know, it’s good for the soul.’ Mark laughed.

                ‘Nancy, I’m a student. If my lecture notes were etched into the bottom of a pint glass, I would be getting full marks. I spent practically all summer half-cut, if not fully-cut, on Hampstead Heath. But Limoncello is a vile liquid.’

                ‘You live in London, then?’

                ‘Nope, Southampton, but this summer I was living with my boyfriend in London.’ Nancy hooted.

                ‘I didn’t have you down as a “follower of Elton”! You don’t dress nearly well enough.’

                ‘Cheers,’ replied Mark drily over Nancy’s merry giggles. ‘A “follower of Elton” is your euphemism for homosexual, I suppose?’ he chuckled at Nancy’s strange phrase. ‘I’ve heard worse, I’ve got to admit’. Nancy took another swig from her flask in an attempt to calm herself.

                ‘So, Mark, other than drinking in a park, what else did you do this summer?’ Nancy asked pointedly. Mark grinned wickedly and met her gaze.

                ‘Oh not much, just…bumming around’. Nancy erupted into a fit of laughter again, and Mark joined in, too. ‘Some people would feel sick if I made a joke like that around them.’

                ‘My dear, I too am a follower of Elton, just not quite in the same way. I have done my best to live a prejudice free life. Homophobia is for the feeble-minded.’ Mark mimed raising a glass.

                ‘I’ll drink to that.’

The U1A approached the Red Funnel ferry terminal, and the pair settled into a steady rhythm, both enjoying the unexpected camaraderie that had developed between them over the course of the bus journey through the heart of Southampton. Once on the Isle of Wight, the two went their separate ways: Mark to celebrate the birth of his niece, and Nancy to say farewell to Doreen in a moment of introspection unnoticed by the 20’000-strong crowd surrounding her that were caught up in Elton John’s masterful balladry, as she had been years before.

Castles Round Two: India

My most viewed post of all time is a post from 2010 about castles. It has 1445 hits as of writing. I put it's success down to niche appeal and lots of pictures. It turns out, I completely dropped the ball on that one.

I am a subscriber to /r/castles, a subreddit kept alive almost single-handedly by this one guy called Hoohill, who posts a new castle every day. How this guy has such an inexhaustible knowledge of castles, I'll never know (Google, probably), but he posts a lot of Indian castles.

These things are absolutely enormous.

They make European and Middle-Eastern castles look like doll's houses. I had absolutely no idea India was such a big player on the castle circuit. I didn't even know India was big on medieval warfare, either. For me, this is the sort of discovery that really highlights how skewed my Euro-centric view of the 1st and 2nd millenniums really is. Picture time, 100% from Mr. Hoohill/Reddit.

For starters: Khumbhalgarh (they all have funny names, don't they). It's walls are 38km long. Yeah bitch, thirty-eight! And the walls aren't just pathetic head-height token efforts, they're massive. LOOK.

And there's more!

It was built in the 15th century, making it one of the younger castles featured in the post, but it is second only to the Great Wall of China in terms of continuous length in the whole world. I'm feeling inadequate already.

"Do you think they're compensating for something, Donkey?"

Khumbhalgarh's older and bigger brother is Chittorgarh (the '-garh' suffix is the noise you make when you plummet from the top of the walls). The walls aren't as long but it covers a greater area, making it the biggest in India, and who knows, probably the world, too. Somehow it was successfully sacked three times. How? It would surely be harder to breach than a Banks, Maldini, Moore, Vidic, Lahm backline. I can't find any pictures that get the whole thing in, so here is the Google Maps URL

A tiny portion of the walls

Another view of Chittorgarh

Aight, then there's this one:

It's called Agra, which I'd say is a pretty decent name for a castle. It's all red and stuff, and has three massive walls stacked on top of each other, just in case, y'know, the invaders are all adept pole-vaulters or something.

Been to the top of the tower? The guidebook says it's a must-see.

The gems held within

For no other reason than it also sounds vaguely like the previous one, this is next one is Kangra Fortress. It looks pretty European-y to my eyes, but what do I know. It must be doubly hard to capture because it would surely be all but impossible to resist the urge to gawp at the amazing landscape below. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but Rohit, have you seen the view?

It's like a fucking fairytale or something

Stop it, India. Just stop it. You're ruining it for the other kids.

While we're on the subject of ridiculously pretty castles, try Amer castle on for size. Get an eyeful o' this:

Mad jel

But don't worry, it doesn't look as good from every angle. PSYCHE! Yes it does.

Let's go out and look at some of the old medieval buildings and
that, because I bet they look even better at night, all lit up

This is Mudgal castle:

According to Hoohill, it is 'a gigantic, long-forgotten fortress.' How do you just forget about a fortress like that? A castle that would be the gem in practically any other nation's castle portfolio is just another standard castle in India. Those spoilt gits. The gates:

Back when Hadrian's Wall was considered an impressive feat of engineering in (modern day) England, India was building stuff like Rajgad Fortress.

A "lower gate" apparently. Doesn't look too low to me

They build a fortress on that thing when England was nothing and the Romans were at their peak

In a similar vein is Lohagad Fortress, which is all run down and overgrown and beautiful. Like Rajgad, it's well over 2000 years old.

It's also pretty high up.

I bet this spur really irritated the civil engineers - "We have to wall the whole thing?!"

I'm not even close to running out of massive/beautiful Indian fortresses, but that's more than enough to get you started. I should probably have dropped this link at the start of the post, but here is my resource: r/castles filtered for India. Nearly all by Hoohill - what a legend.

One last one - Gwalior - 'one of history's greatest fortresses'. The place where zero was used for the first time (say whaaaaaa!). Tough and beautiful. Just like a Banks, Maldini, Moore, Vidic, Lahm backline.

A real hero, and a real human being