I Race For Life

My venerable and trusty car has passed her MOT, but not without failing it first.  Some work to the suspension and brake pipes, and way hay!  She and I are good for another year and this morning I walked to pick her up from the garage.  I didn't run because my legs are a little stiff from mountaineering in Poland.

I've just checked the definition of 'mountaineering' - a word I don't think I've used in relation to myself before - and it is: the sport or activity of climbing mountains. Run and race are other words I haven't used much, largely because the Race for Life was my first running race since an egg and spoon race in 1974.

Like mountaineering, running is a thing that can make my legs feel stiff, but having completed 20 parkruns, 5K doesn't leave me feeling terrible any more.  In any case, running the 5K Race for Life was made so much easier by the amazing support of all those who sponsored me (thank you), and by the fantastic pink atmosphere in the Quarry Park in Shrewsbury (where I bumped into Annette and Fern, also running).  The Race for Life was made very simple by thoughts of friends living with cancer: people whom I love and want to show that I love by doing something useful.

Since the Race for Life, I've run the parkrun in Krakow, after which I went off to do some thoroughly enjoyable mountaineering with my longest serving friend and her brother in the Tatras.  I thought of my friends whilst I was there too.  Having arrived home yesterday evening, I decided to rehabilitate my legs this morning by walking the couple of miles to pick my car up from the garage.  When I got there, on the front seat was the bill (reasonable, considering) and a five pound note: a donation that I was given the night before the Race for Life.

I am always delighted to see £5, but I was particularly pleased to see this note as I've been feeling a bit awkward since I realised I'd mislaid it somewhere (but where?) in my car.  My excuse, had anyone accused me of carelessness (which no one did) is that I was handed it just after I'd seen an amazing chamber production of Verdi's Rigoletto.  To differentiate this from other operas, it's the one in which boy meets girl, trouble ensues, then tragedy ends it all badly. 

I'm pleased my car's still on the road, that my legs are easier after this morning's gentle walk, that the money's come back to me (via Dave and my trusty car) to go on to its rightful place with Cancer Research UK, and that the £337.50 I raised by running the Race for Life will be used to help beat (to quote one friend) feccin' cancer and the feccin' awful things it does to people.

I Outlive My Mother

I've just worked out the number of days my mother lived.  It's 19,166.  I then worked out the number of days I've been alive.  As of today, it's 19,166. When the identical number popped onto the screen, I felt momentarily ... well ... weird.

19,166 days is approximately fifty-two-and-a-half years.

I've never calculated the number of days anyone's lived before.  To do it, I used my favourite search engine and entered 'calculate the number of days between two dates' and found timeanddate.com (should you ever feel the need to do the same).

And why did I do this today?  It's not as if my home is clean and tidy, and I have finished writing all the poems I want to write, and that novel, and sorted out all the bags and boxes still languishing in my loft since my move last year.  It's not as if I had nothing else to do. 

How I got to this point is this:


Walking back home this morning, my younger son pointed out a sign in Shrewsbury town centre for the Race for Life.  "You could do that, Mum," he said.  When we got home, I signed up for it, and, as part of that, Cancer Research created a sponsorship page for me.  I thought of the people I know who've died from cancer, and those who've lived through it, and those living through it, and of one  friend in particular.  And I thought of my mother who died of breast cancer, and because I've had some awareness that I'm approaching fifty-two-and-a-half, and because I've got a day off work, and because I am very creative when it comes to putting off housework, I've been idling around on my laptop and in my musings.


From there, where I've got to is this - that the significance of the 19,166 days I've lived equalling, for this day only, the number of days my mother lived is about the alignment of some things.

What aligned today is significant but not because of that number.  It's more to do with my son encouraging me to take up the parkrun; his interest in my progress; our going shopping on a day in half term; our walking back a particular route because of the particular shopping he wanted to do; his noticing the Race for Life advertisement; his prompting me to sign up for the run.

The alignment is to do with the love we and his big brother share, and within all that, our particular love for music - a love he'd also have shared with my mother, a pianist, whom he never met, but whose material substance somehow shines through him in a way that belongs only to him every time his fingers, long as hers were, play over the piano keys, and every time he smiles his smile, which, like hers, is a bright shaft of sunlight illuminating and soothing whatever any day's sadnesses might be.