My Head Hurts!

 

This photo here shows me at the Start/Finish point of most of our run training. This is all part of a massive amount of private land The Angmering Park Estate. In the background you see a very large farm building where once stood a neglected old flint building that locals will remember calling, The Maggot Farm. When the planning notice first went up it said something like, ‘To replace existing farm building with new farm premises’. The Maggot Farm, was the size of a Sussex cottage and shed. This as you can see is the size of a football pitch. It has a huge wall that the locals have enjoyed enormously, filling the space with graffiti using hunks of chalk that lay on the ground everywhere in these parts. Recently the estate has been clearing another space a couple of miles away, edging it with a beautiful curved stack of felled tree trunks where for a number of years a derelict low loader and some farm machinery died. I am wondering if the planning notice will read ‘To replace existing farm structures with a vast new wood mill where stood a half dozen bee skiffs’!

 

 

Yesterday my husband Stephen was out all day working and thankful that he had work to do he had left home at 5.30 am for the twelve-hour day he had told me to expect.

My brief dream, that I would have a day to do whatever I fancied. That was shot down in flames before he left when he told me what my training schedule would be.

After the initial Betty-ing around, tidying up and putting the washing on etc.

Attending to some email messages too.

So I left starting my hour-long ballet workout until almost 8 am.

Then the next session was an hour of turbo training up in the box room.

The final part of today’s total workout was a short easy pace run close to home.

Obviously, a bath came next.

 

After that, I had in my mind that since Steve would not be bothering me, unless there was a problem, that I could start tidying up my poetry files on my laptop.

My mistake was leaving the CNN news channel on, so that I could see how and the Trump/Biden Presidential election results were doing.

As team after team of election specialist commentators did their presentation’s, I quickly realised that I would not be able to do any sorting, since that would take too much concentration on my behalf; to get the wild mess of files that I have tucked away, placed in sensible order.’ Over a thousand poems and then some divided into categories, and dozens of those too. No. There was a choice to be made and the fluffy world of poetry was the victim once more and I dropped the idea of the poetry purge altogether. Dream on Daphne.

 

I got so sucked into the if’s and but’s and the mathematics of the USA results system. The ‘Magic Board’ that they returned to over and over again, was mentally and visually magnetic. Something that has been going through my own thought’s this year with all the extra trials that are going on world-wide (Covid; to name a few), is that neither the USA or the UK are what their names suggest are they. We are not ‘United’, in the United Kingdom. Neither are Americans in my opinion, looking at all the days and days of election results, well it’s a big country, and the United States of America are, it seems as far from United as we Brits are.

 

Stephen had been listening all day while he travelled, completed the delivery and returned home. His head hurt too.

So this morning we went out for a nice walk in the countryside to brush all the intensity of election fever out of our heads.

What sheer heaven to be outside on a sunny day for our exercise today.

 

What a surprise to see that although the country is supposed to be in lockdown; that the world and his wife were out enjoying the sunshine in Arundel as we passed through to somewhere quieter to breathe air into our own lungs. Though we were prepared and did have masks, we noticed that most people out with their children feeding the ducks and swans were not wearing masks. It looked like a summer bank holiday as we passed along Mill Road and drove past Swanbourne Lake where it was swarming with people and there were no parking places left anywhere, cars and camper vans galore, nose to tail and picnics everywhere.