Ta-daaa!

I did it!
In I hour 52 minutes!
I didn't die!
Or break anything!
I'm sooooo happy!
THANK YOU EVERYONE!
Photos coming!
Too many exclamation marks!
It's the adrenalin!
I am sore!

A bag of nerves writes

The run is tomorrow.

Hooray for me: no more pounding the concrete, no more perspiration issues, no more silly 'Eye of the Tiger' peaked cap, no more blinding people with my bling-bling trainers, no more begging my long-suffering friends to mind the kids, no more teenage mockery, no more injuries, no more lost little boys, no more advances from nice-looking stragers. oh.

Hooray for you: no more posts about running, trainers, toe photos, me, me, me, aren't I fit.

More staying in bed. More junk food. More Desperate Housewife, less Challenge Annika. Once the small matter of tomorrow is over, I am going to zip myself into a giant duvet (with arm and head holes), fetch the remote, find a family bag of Doritos and lock the door.

I'm a chicken

Whoops!

Did I mention a "happy dance"? I'm sorry: I think I was drunk when I wrote that last entry. Despite having a talent for self-promotion at any cost, I've decided to make you work a little harder before publishing such a humiliating spectacle rare display of artistic physical expression.
In other words, I've moved the goalposts and bumped up my new target to £1500.

I apologise for lying. Here, look at this pleasantly distracting picture:

An offer you can't refuse*

5 days to go til the race.

We've just been in the UK and consumed an Everest of pies, chocolate and cream cakes. I ran once: it felt like my trainers were filled with concrete.

I am nervous.

My feet are begging to be let off the hook.

The friction burn in my armpit is still apparent.

But I am ready as I'll ever be, so BRING IT ON!

A HUGE thank you to all my sponsors. I am £139 off my target. *If I make my target, I will do my happy dance, video it and post it here.

What we did at the weekend

Switzergent: Isn't this fun! Here we are at the Morges Tulip Festival. I love flowers and gardens and things. I love doing wholesome things like this and going everywhere by bike!

Switzerlady: Is he trying to kill me? My feet are on fire. There is a friction burn in my armpit. I have a sweat patch the size of Europe on the back of my nice purple top. It is all uphill on the way home. I am going to be sulky and passive aggressive for the rest of the afternoon.*

Emma: I am bored. I want an ice cream.

Gloria: I am bored too. I will steal your ice-cream when your back is turned.

*in reality i may have had a nice time

And now for something really revolting

If you are reading and eating your lunch at the same time, I suggest you put your sandwich down.

Look at that humungous blister on the side of my hallux. The purplish hue on the other side doesn't bode well, either. I'm not sure how the two middle toes got covered in blood, but the end of my nice white sock looked like it had been dipped in strawberry jam. It reminded me of the last time I had a bloody sock - a leech snuck into my boot on a trekking holiday and tucked into my foot for a tasty snack. I squished him as I walked. I had no idea he was there until I feel a warm liquid gush over my toes. Poor old leech.

I think I'll leave it there.

PS Ran 15km yesterday!

Here are my Easter bunnies on their Easter egg hunt. They're standing on the ledge of the local bakers, a stone's throw from our place. (If you roll out of bed and aim, you land in a soft, doughy pile of croissants.)

We ended up by the swings in the afternoon sun. Emma got her paws on several large eggs, which Gloria then attacked like a shark. The resulting mess was noteworthy.

Happy days.

Stitt of Liverpool

Slavery. It is easy to be an old cynic. When I saw pictures of the demonstrators looking glum with T-Shirts reading "so sorry," I felt a mixture of annoyance and toe-curling embarrassment on their behalf. Empty gesture, I thought. It was horrible but a long time ago, I thought. Why not do some real campaigning where slavery still exists, I thought. And if you have time - lose that beard and those sandals.

With the annoyance and embarrassment, though, guilt also crept in. So what if people wanted to say sorry for slavery? Why didn't I think it was that important? Did I think it had nothing to do with me?

Lying in my bed, thinking randomly about this (and other things, like what happens next in Grey's Anatomy) I remembered an 19th century portrait that used to hang in our house when I was a kid. It was of a serious, dark-haired, wealthy looking-man. "Stitt of Liverpool" was his name, and it was my name too until I got married.

(I will pause for a moment to let you get over the high comedy value of the name 'Stitt." Think of what it rhymes with; observe what it reads backwards; fall about laughing. When you have recovered your composure, please continue.)

I didn't know anything about Stitt of Liverpool, other than he surely had to be an ancestor. The only other pair of Stitts in the phone book were relatives, and the fact he had made it as far as our house had to be significant as we lived in London, which is a long way from Liverpool. His portrait hung in the stairwell on a salmon pink wall: it was the seventies. I used to slide down the bannister while he looked on, pursing his lips disapprovingly. (They would purse even more when he saw me drinking Thunderbird with my teenage friends while my parents slept)

The other night it wasn't his lips or the pink wall that bothered me: it was reading earlier how Liverpool had been a port with well-established and flourishing commercial connections to the slave trade. Was Stitt of Liverpool a slave trader? He was obviously wealthy. Did he profit from the slave trade? Had I benefitted from that profit? I felt queasy at the thought, and slightly panic-stricken. And annoyed: I wanted to be asleep, not thinking about all this.

There is no easy end to this story. I looked up SoL on the internet; he was definitely a relative and an iron merchant and a devout Presbyterian. It doesn't mention anything about slavery connections, but that doesn't mean they're not there. And I feel a bit more humble and more disposed towards the demonstrators than I did.

And it's Good Friday today. With the enormity of sin, how much more enormous is the cross of Jesus.

The fox and the hare

On two of my most recent training runs, guess which of the following things happened to me. Did I
a) get chatted up
or
b) help a very small boy refind his mother?

The answer is both.

Improbable as it sounds Unsurprisingly for such a sweating, hairy youthful, attractive mother of two I was approached by a very good-looking, nattily-dressed Brazilian-looking bloke as I was struggling up the last and meanest hill on my usual route.
"Bonjour!" said he. (The fact he was walking and I was 'running' should tell you how fast I am, plus the fact we could have a conversation at all. Paula Radcliffe can sleep easy in her bed.)
Then he said things like 'do you run here often?' and questions of an ilk this clapped out bit of mutton girl hasn't been asked for some years now. I rather enjoyed it, but then told him I was married at which point he disappeared like a wil'o the wisp. Probably just as well.

Yesterday at the lake I saw a boy of about 5, tears and snot streaming down his face behind a tree. "Are you lost?" I said, in the manner of a kindly old lady. "Let's go and find Mummy, shall we?" My heart swelled with goodness and warmth for being such a good citizen. All of 5 minutes later, we found her. I wasn't expecting much, perhaps some tears and my hand clasped weakly in gratitude, followed by Esther Rantzen jumping out from behind a bush as a nearby band played the theme tune from 'Hearts of Gold'. Instead she just looked at the kid and yelled "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!" after which I scarpered in case she thought I had been trying to abduct him.

So you see - never a dull moment.