unironedman

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And skips to fill before I sleep
And skips to fill before I sleep…*

We’re in Italy, so of course my trainer has a top of the range Cipollini bike. In keeping with the Italian theme, her legs could have been carved by Michelangelo. Though the great Buonarroti would have drawn the line at the mahogany patina. Nor would he have noticed the passing resemblance to a youthful Julia Roberts. Neither did I, of course. But I digress.

We are struggling up a 7% incline about 10 kilometres out of a picture-postcard village in Tuscany. I think. I’m not sure. There are Lombardy Poplars standing sentinel along the roadside, and beyond, serried ranks of vines. The sky is impossibly blue, and I’m struggling to get up to the required and recommended RPM.

We’re only about 15 minutes into the ride, and I’m starting to sweat. I reach down and put the fan on. Just on the first setting. I don’t want my trainer to think I’m a complete wuss. Jenny Fletcher hails from Texas, and on top of being a professional triathlete and fashion model, she does this stuff for a living (taking idiots like me on short bike rides in Tuscany), and I suspect she doesn’t suffer fools. I suspect, in fact, that she has us all boiled alive in chain oil after she has surveyed our various disappointing statistics that are being collated as we toil. Your cheery smile isn’t fooling me, Jenny. I’m starting to look for an escape route. But we are wedded together on this ride for the next 15 minutes.

Unless there’s a power cut, I suppose.

I glance across at the silent and empty row of bikes beside me. Off to the right, a few hardy souls are already pounding out the miles on the treadmills. In front of me, several lads are heaving dumbbells around like there’s no tomorrow. We finish our bike ride, Jenny and I, and she’s still chatting away to me. I can’t hear a word she’s saying because I never bring my earphones to the gym. I prefer to hear the god-awful piped music, and relish in the clatter and chaos of heavy metal things getting lifted and dropped repeatedly. It’s a metaphor for life, I suppose. Sisyphus may have been the one tortured with the boulder, but the gods got the idea from working out in a gym. Of that there is no doubt.

I add Italy to my list of lovely places to cycle. Last time, it was Canada, and before that, Jamaica. I think. I’m really not sure. Everybody on iFit is so very, very lovely. I must bring the earphones next time, so I can get to know Jenny better. Maybe she’s not so scary after all.

I faff about a bit with the leg extension machine, and then the cable pull thing. My heart isn’t really in it. I was sipping tea at home from about 7.30am on this cool, grey Sunday morning when Tamsyn rang to say her bus hadn’t showed up and could I drop her to work. And as she works IN the gym, it did seem churlish to refuse a lift and also avoid doing a bit of a workout.

But as I was pulling various weights in different directions on the functional trainer, I remembered there is a 6 cubic metre skip at home in the yard, waiting for me to take the air out of it. And so, perhaps, I needed to save some energy for that. This skip (well, not this actual skip) was ordered at the end of January, and promptly cancelled a day later when I fell of the roof. The pile of stuff out on the patio in my folk’s place seemed to keep growing, oddly enough, even though I wasn’t adding to it.

(When I re-ordered the skip this week, the gent on the line said, oh, I see here you cancelled this back in January due to an accident… what happened? Are you okay? Yes, indeed thanks. I explained about the incident, and it turned out the exact same thing happened to his brother recently. Small world. Well, small world of careless people falling off roofs, I suppose).

My brother Rob popped over for a brief spell. It’s been a whirlwind few weeks. Tuesday before last, I took my Mum over to Leicestershire for the funeral of our dear friend, Jeff. We flew into Luton from Dublin, and met up with my brother, who had hired a car. Needless to say, there was a lot more to it than that, but Mum got through it relatively unscathed, despite RyanAir’s best attempts to thwart our every move, including delaying the flight by an hour, moving the gate at the last minute (in my mind, I could hear David Attenborough narrating the scene of the migrating hoards of would-be passengers trying to find their new departure point), and then keeping us sitting on the plane for another hour while the poor, under-the-weather toddler behind us went into a mini-meltdown, bless him. Kudos to the passenger who asked would we be getting free drinks. I’m not sure what the ruling is, but as this is a Micheal O’Leary show, I’m guessing we’d have to be held captive for about three weeks before we’d get anything on the house (or the, eh, plane…)

And in any case, the last thing this debacle needed was free booze. Though the parents behind me may have begged to differ, I suppose.

I hadn’t really thought the whole travel thing through terribly well, which explains why I was simultaneously pushing Mum in a wheelchair with one hand, and navigating the way with her mobility walker in the other. And though I had checked a box on the website requiring assistance, we weren’t listed as needing the platform lift for the actual plane. That was resolved, but when we finally made it out onto the apron on a cold, wet and blustery Monday around midday, we were told we couldn’t take the rollator on board, and that it would go in the hold.

As we strapped ourselves in to the mobile platform for the very short journey across the tarmac to the Boeing 737-800, I could spy the little blue wheeler still on the ground near a mobile stairs. And I resigned myself to the fact that we would never see it again…

Reader, I should have more faith! When we finally landed (with a massive shudder) at Luton, and waited for every living soul to depart the aircraft, the little blue walker was waiting for us at the bottom of the steps. More pushing and shoving of wheelchairs, with some great help from an immensely cheerful Londoner who reminded us on several occasions that he’s really management in the services area, and generally doesn’t do the pushing around (well, not the physical pushing around, ha ha). We soon found ourselves at a bus depot area in the swirling chaos that is Luton Airport. A dropped pin from my brother suggested he was about half a kilometre away in the car park, and I decided it was more faff to start getting on and off buses, and we pushed on, finishing the final leg of the journey towards the car on foot. Well, feet and wheels, to be correct.

We took the A1 northbound. English folk probably know that this route is the longest numbered road in the UK, at 410 miles, stretching from London to Edinburgh. And keen history folk will add that it follows much of what was called the Great North Road before that. And before that again, the Romans would have set out from Londinium along Ermine Street. Today, there is not much to report from the A1. Other than the usual roadworks and traffic, a motorway café that does have toilets, but the tea machine is broken, so mother is not impressed. And Red Kites. They are a small oasis of joy in an otherwise featureless countryside. (I do also spot a few RAF bases, reminding me that my country of origin is quite the belligerent nation. Of things that fly, I prefer the Kites). We leave the A1 at Stamford and head west towards Oakham. There we finally meet up with my Auntie Pam (Mum’s sister) and two of her three boys. They too are going through the throes of funeral planning, as they lost their Dad – Uncle Pete – about a week after Jeff. And of course, this posed a rather unfortunate dilemma for Mum and I. And in the end, the compromise was us spending a day or two with Pam either side of Jeff’s funeral, as it was too much to expect Mum to make the crossing twice in the space of week.

Rather than overload Auntie P with people, Rob and I stayed in a pub B&B in town called The Angler. We were reminded by our cousins that this used to be quite the den of iniquity back in the day, and that we had had a few boozy nights there in our youth. I hadn’t copped it, I admit. But then, the pool table was gone, along with all the other rough and ready features of a dodgy English pub (what is it with fruit machines?) to be replaced with a fancy new bar, kitchen and a colour scheme straight out of a heritage catalogue. That said, they managed to serve the pot of tea that Mum was gasping for at a lukewarm temperature. Not an English tradition, I should add. Just really bad service. But the food was good… when it finally arrived.

Above: a selection of pics from the trip, including some rather posh breakfasts for me and Rob in Oakham; my Uncle Rob, Auntie Pam and Mum; a couple of images from St. Leonard’s Church in Swithland, and a nice one of Normanton Church in Rutland Water (and I do mean ‘in’ Rutland Water…). I included the screen shot from the road map simply coz it tickled me: what road are we on? Not sure… I think it’s the A6…

Sorry, there was a point to all this, I’m sure. We paid our respects at the funeral, said goodbye to dear friends, and made our way home again in more or less the reverse fashion. This time, the capricious gods of travel were off tormenting some other poor sods, and we sailed home in relative ease and comfort. Even the weather smiled upon these weary travellers. And the captain landed the plane rather than the standard RyanAir practice of shutting off the engines at 600 feet and dropping onto the runway to save fuel.

Brother Rob pushed the boat out, in fairness to him. He attended Pete’s funeral this week, and as he said himself, by the time he had flown from Italy to London, and then over to Dublin on the red-eye flight on Friday morning, he was genuinely not sure where he was, geographically-speaking. Even his déjà vu was having déjà vu. And although he didn’t grumble, he must have wondered if the detour was worth the effort, because he was set to work on Friday and we moved a mountain of waste into the yard in readiness for the skip. It’s double-movement of a sort, really, but it allowed us to clean the patio down, and surroundings. This whole construction of archways, greenhouses, a sauna and barbecue stand was the creation of our Dad, and cleaning it out was not without its moments of nostalgia and emotion.

We celebrated the Great Tidy Up with a few pints of Guinness in the Salmon Leap, and then the next morning, I dropped him to his flight back to Italy. Maybe he’ll meet my bike coach…

There is other news, of course. Last weekend, Gary dragged me out for a 15k run. We took in some of the canal (quelle surprise!) and Carton Estate, which is all rather lovely (though unfortunately getting annexed by golf courses and expensive homes). But the running is sporadic at best. There is a rumour that an old fire service colleague may have a spare ticket for the Dublin Marathon; if that pans out, it would be the ideal thing to get me back out again on a more regular basis. More on that if and when it happens.

Gary with his Donadea Running Club mates at a recent timed 5k race in Leixlip

S and I are finally getting around to watching the Breaking Bad series. This may come as a shock to some (and probably not at all to others), but you need to bear in mind that I have never seen ET either.

I finished my OSCE exam last week, though I won’t get results for a week or two. Not sure how it went, to be honest. I had just returned from the funeral the night before, so it was a bit of a blur. More on that too, I guess.

And finally, some good news on the sporting front, after seeing Leinster manfully disregard every lifeline thrown to them from Toulouse, and losing their third Heineken Champions Cup final in a row in extra time. Yes, Manchester United won the FA Cup. It wasn’t on my bingo card, I admit. But out of nowhere, they produced a great performance, and kept the great City pantheon of stars relatively quiet. De Brunye was subbed off, such was Pep’s dismay at his side’s capitulation. Erling Haaland hit the bar, but that was about it from him. And the feisty Phil Foden was marshalled out of the game. Indeed, it was actually Kyle Walker who stung Onana’s gloves on a few occasions. Doku should have come on sooner.

And I suppose I’ll be coaching United next season. Watch this space…

And now, some silly memes from the interweb of things recently…

And I’ll finish with a couple of images from the recent Darkness Into Light walk. I hadn’t realised there was an official walk in our local park until I made my way up there about 4.45am. It was the same night as the famous Northern Lights, which I managed to miss.

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(* With apologies to Robert Frost)