There is also a pleasing neatness to running, a simple question of placing one foot in front of the other to a regular drumbeat and watching the seconds pass by until a specified target has been reached. Targets must be set before stepping foot on the treadmill if they are to stand any hope of being reached. I used to watch television whilst running, on one occasion even spotting a nine-letter word on Countdown somewhere in the midst of my fourth kilometre, probably one of the most satisfying and self-righteous thirty seconds of my entire life.
Executing wordplay and burning calories? I have the power!
The TV viewing had to end after an incident during a newsflash which showed, from the perspective of the driver, a high-speed crash into the wall during a Formula 1 race. My instinctive reaction was to dive to one side to try to escape the impending impact and what followed was a frantic thirty seconds of scrambling to keep my balance and not crash down on to the fast-moving belt before being spat out into the middle of the room like waste from an effluent pipe. Now I just look out of the window towards the restaurant over the road.
It pleases me to note that while I am burning calories, people nearby are piling them on. It feels like gaining double the advantage over the other contestants in the human race.
Two for One. TwoFourOne. 241, 241, 241. I am unable to understand how it is that people gain any enjoyment from swimming, or how they could find it in any sense relaxing. There is a distinct difference between exercising and avoiding death by drowning. I have never been good at swimming, because there is no incentive beyond not drowning. If I fall out of a boat, I will survive, but I refuse to start a process of devolution by working my way back into the water.
We began life aquatically and then developed over time the necessary limbs and body parts to live on land. As far as I am concerned if you are a good swimmer then that means simply that you have not yet evolved far enough. I splash and sink and veer off line and cannot help but divert every thought I have towards how uncomfortable I am.
Only on occasion do the things I see penetrate the blissful bubble I enter when I am running. I cannot seem to help but get enraged when I see people parking in the parent and toddler spaces who are clearly neither parents, nor toddlers and certainly not both. I have thought of complaining to the staff but I don’t want the girl at reception to come to know me as a snitch and a jobsworth. Miss! Miss! They’re cheating and it’s not fair!
On the whole, problems begin to unravel themselves subconsciously whilst exercising and I wonder why I make things so difficult the rest of the time. Perhaps this is what it is like to meditate, I wonder, and resolve to take more time to breathe and step back from the problems I generate. I could have put the number card in front of me, with the flower on the opposite side and the salt and pepper to my left and right – it certainly would have done the job until the number card was taken away, but instead I picked at people who were just trying to get through the day, in the same way I am doing when I play traffic wardens on the treadmill.
Some days I feel as though I could run for ever, but there are others that are a constant struggle. Those days are always better once I get through them, but so much harder at the time. Today I am tired almost instantly and my right leg seems more tired than the left. I wonder if this means I am about to have a heart attack and look up at the display to see how close I am to my five-kilometre target.
2.21km
Not even half way. I reach for my drink and take a deep breath but that makes my heart hurt while I swallow and my brain starts telling me I have to slow down, to walk for a minute and get my breath back. I know better though. This is a trick and if I do that I won’t be able to get up to speed again – I have to keep going and get through this brief period of struggle. I make an involuntary noise as I exhale, a short, sharp moan, the kind of noise people in poorly acted films make when they wake up suddenly from a nightmare.
Hurgh!
It helps, though – it makes the struggle real and not just in my head. I begin to imagine that I am a soldier training for a battle in which I must defend my people from the invading forces of evil. People depend on me – women and children – so I have to keep going. Puffing out my chest I open my stride a little and try to settle into a rhythm staring straight ahead.
These battles go on and on until I realise I am approaching the end of my run. For the last few hundred metres I increase my pace to make sure I have the satisfying feeling of total exhaustion at the end and now everything hurts. The music in my headphones is at top volume and although I can’t hear it I am pretty sure I’m making a whole series of unattractive noises now.
Argh! Euch! Heeerrr!
But I don’t care – I must defend my people.
When the dial reaches 5km I grab for the speed control and pull right back to walking pace, panting deeply and clutching for the handrails along the sides of the treadmill. Almost instantly I become aware of how red my face must be and what noises I have been making. Now that the fight is over, the negative thoughts come back almost instantly and they are angry at having been held down for so long.
Other people have run much further and made much less of a fuss about it. Only a child would need to pretend he was a warrior to get through such a short run. You are pathetic.
My brief respite is over and my focus once again turns to the real world, until tomorrow when I get to run again. Not really going anywhere, but somehow managing to escape all the same.
When you turn around to get off the machine, everybody will be looking at you. Men with muscles and pretty girls flushed with colour and their hair bouncing behind them will look at you with one eyebrow raised to show how unattractive you look with your shiny beet-root face and your pigeon chest.
But nobody is there when I turn around. The gym is empty, save for a giant man in the far corner lifting everything he can reach above his head and a cocky young personal trainer checking his emails on the computer by the entrance. I wipe all the evidence of my visit off the machine with the antibacterial wipes provided and head down to the shower, my legs slightly unsteady beneath me. Time to brave myself for another potential visit to the disgusting testicle buffet.
Entering the changing rooms and rounding the corner to my locker of choice:
Two for one. 241.
At first there is no one there, but as I am taking my towel from my locker and stripping down to shower (leaving my shorts on for the journey to the shower, to protect my dignity) he arrives. A sea of empty lockers to choose from and for some reason number 243 is the only choice for this short, fat man with tattoos on his arms to get ready for his swim. Most likely a prop-forward for the local rugby team, he considers his comfort with exposing his small penis to a room full of strangers to be a show of his heterosexuality.
It’s my penis, deal with it. Touch it if you like, I won’t be turned on ’cos I’m straight see? Touch it, go on. TOUCH IT! JUST LOOK AT IT! ASK IT SOMETHING!
I gather my things quickly and head off to the shower, selecting the one furthest from the entrance on the left-hand side. My urge is to head to the right but I avoid that as I imagine fewer people have used the left side and therefore the chance of cross-contamination is reduced. I have been lucky enough to find the shower gel I will use for the rest of my life, should market forces allow such a thing. A blend of lemon, cinnamon and coconut flavours – the lemon and coconut making it refreshing and fragrant but the cinnamon adding a spice that justifies this as a man’s product, just about.
Showering is something that I imagine everybody in the world does, eventually, the same way every day. It would be impossible over time not to get into a habit of washing the same things, in the same order, every time you execute a task. Wouldn’t it? It does not come naturally to me to be spontaneous, and admittedly that is the only way in which it can come. As soon as you have planned to do something spontaneously, you actually haven’t. Why wouldn’t you choose to plan something ahead of time rather than ‘see how it goes’? I can tell you how i
t will go, my friend – not as well as it would have if you had planned it.
Dressing myself after my shower, I switch my phone back on and after a moment I get two texts:
Great. I’m off tomorrow night. Is that too soon? x
followed by:
Good idea, I’ve got news about a publisher for you. Let’s talk tomorrow, come to the office.
Holy shit. Now I’ve done it.
My whole body tingles with excitement, shivers down my spine, my scalp itches and my eyes water. Most importantly, the smile on my face is absolutely irremovable. If the man with the small penis and the tattoos comes back now I could get myself into a lot of trouble! There’s no use pretending I haven’t been waiting for the first text since I left Yorkshire this morning, and whatever the reason for its late arrival I can now start thinking further ahead. The pressure on a first date is absolutely immense, as memories are being stored for ever for recollection as a ‘this is what we did on our first date’ anecdote. Let us say, for the sake of example, that this wonderful girl and I spent a magical afternoon together walking hand in hand through a meadow, as is more than possible, but on rounding the final corner of our walk we were confronted by a huge pile of dog mess. I would berate myself unfairly for not having checked our route beforehand and removed any such offending artefacts.
Try as I might I would be unable to disassociate the thought of dog shit when I thought of her, as a truly perfect woman would never even be around such foulness. Even were we to get together and stay with one another for thirty contented years, should she turn to me one summer’s evening and whisper, ‘Oh Jon, do you remember our afternoon in the meadow?’ I would reply, ‘Of course … There was shit everywhere!’
As for the second text, my head’s in a complete spin. I can’t think about the book now – it’s too much for me to take in. Besides, I have to get ready for Gemma. I would be a fool to think anything is more important than finding someone who makes me happy and who I can make happy too.
So first I need to go home and put my house back together again, then I can write a list for tomorrow and forget that this weekend ever happened. A perfect day beckons, if I can only get it right.
Planning gives me comfort in stressful times, so back at home I reach for my diary, turn to tomorrow’s date and start scheduling …
MONDAY
07.58
THE PERFECT DAY BEGINS
So you’ve got yourself a date, says Private Jonny. That won’t come to anything.
Well, let’s just see, shall we, fights back Public Jon.
Two different people wake up in my bed each day, but they are both inside me. We are all a much more complex machine than we seem to the people who know us – I consider that I am at least two very different people.
There is the side of my personality which manifests itself most when I am with other people, the man I call ‘Public Jon’. It isn’t a very good nickname, rather too toilety for my tastes, but I can’t think what else to call him. Despite how it may seem from what I have written about my time in shared accommodation, I actually make a lot of effort around people to be genial and pleasant company. I tell jokes almost relentlessly to attempt to amuse people. I let things go that I might otherwise have allowed to bother me and I am far more forgiving of other people than I am of myself. On a day when I am around people from morning until night, I can slowly eradicate the negative thoughts that abound at other times and by its end feel liberated and content to live as others do – a little more so anyway!
I believe strongly that you have to find happiness in your natural state. Drugs and extreme hobbies might help take you away from that natural state from time to time and this can be a very good thing, provided you are not running away from confronting life in its normal form. The things you feel when you are sober and alone cannot be outrun. When your head hits the pillow at night and there is nothing around to distract you but endless dark, that’s who you are.
Friends of mine will, night after night, watch films in bed, or listen to audiobooks or music in order to help them drift off to sleep. Some people read books to achieve the same goal. In my opinion these are all ways of silencing the version of yourself that is trying to speak to you then. This is the other side of me, the one I call ‘Private Jonny’. Aggressive and confrontational, he pulls no punches in making me aware of things I have done wrong that were entirely my own fault. When I get into bed tonight, I know very well that he will force me to address whatever has happened during the day.
As much as I hate him, he is the one who improves me. He reminds me of my errors so that they can be avoided in future. He makes me aware of the impact my actions had on other people, which I might have missed at the time when in what people call ‘the moment’. He is important. The arguments between these two can be epic. Public Jon thinks that Private Jonny is too negative and isn’t the person that defines me. He thinks that his strict rules and perfectionism are what make it harder for him to be happy around others and to find love.
Private Jonny on the other hand thinks that Public Jon is a careless hedonist, who doesn’t take enough time to think through his choices and so says insensitive things and leaves people with an unfair image of who Jon really is. They both agree that too long spent discussing each other in the third person is likely to result in the evolution of a third Jon who forgets to go to the toilet and eats paper while grinning to himself quietly in the corner.
As to which of these two people is the real you, a balancing act between the two is essential. You cannot escape the latter but, do not forget, nobody else will remember that person. When you die nobody will say:
Well, Jon was a real bastard when he was around people, but alone enjoyed poetry and suffered deeply for the injustices of the world.
Wear your brightest traits on your sleeve, for all to see, and do your tailoring at home. But don’t forget to seek some happiness for yourself too. I have some very powerful memories of time spent on my own. I’ve eaten incredible meals on my own, travelled to beautiful places on my own but also overcome horribly difficult periods on my own, and all of those things can be important. I certainly find it difficult to relate to people who seem incapable of doing anything on their own, needing company even whilst simply watching TV and drinking a cup of tea for fear of what their brain might do to them while it has no one there to interrupt it.
The fact that Private Jonny is unhappy is down to me to change, but not now, because now he is just miserable because of the time of day.
Once I had finished getting everything back in order last night, I opened a bottle of wine as a reward, and am now paying a heavy price for having done so. Once the bottle was finished and I had indulged in a little ‘Spin and Win’ I felt marvellous and, I should imagine, pretty much skipped into bed. Well now I feel awful. I think I would feel absolutely fine if I had been sick the night before, but I was just drunk enough not to realise I was drunk. This is one of many pieces of logic that occurs naturally to the regular binge drinker, but will appal anyone else. The idea that a good night ends with you vomiting all that you have consumed throughout the evening to try to prevent the internal damage it will cause as you sleep should serve as a warning that those substances ought to be avoided anyway.
To me, vomiting in the evening has the power to downgrade drinking to no more than having a game of internal dress-up for adults. For one evening, I am allowed to be someone else, to speak their language and to think their thoughts, and by shedding that skin before I go to bed, I can wake up as myself again, none the worse for the experience. I am quite content to get drunk on my own, enjoying the resulting freedom to walk around my flat naked and talk to myself in a range of decreasingly accurate and increasingly racist regional accents, taking care not to develop these as a habit that might surface outside of the house.
It’s not that I can’t do those things sober, just that the thought doesn’t really occur to me, or the risk of being caught seems too great. A neighbour redelivering
a parcel once overheard me swearing at my television in a kind of Croatian–Russian hybrid accent, but then my neighbours don’t like me anyway so it’s not like I had anything to lose.
Despite rising at eight o’clock, I try to avoid leaving my house before nine unless absolutely essential. Travel before nine is a living hell of suits dragging unwilling bodies onto already packed buses and trains or into cars with cold seats and loud, frightfully cheerful breakfast DJs. It is the obligation of every self-employed person in the country to alleviate some of this stress by staying at home until official working hours have begun, passing the time by drinking tea and watching breakfast news. What new global catastrophes should I feel somehow responsible for today? I have a train to catch, but not for a few hours, which is ample time to feel I could have prevented murders and berate myself for not doing more for charity. I wonder whether I feel ill simply because of the hangover, or am I nervous about how the rest of today will pan out? Decisions I make today could well affect the rest of my life – this could be the first day on a path to becoming Jon Richardson, published author and husband to Gemma, his wife and business partner in his Lakeland bistro. A smile! Now there’s a turn up for the book.
12.59
TRAIN TO PADDINGTON
I can’t risk going any further with Gemma. I reached this conclusion on the way to the train station. What was I thinking earlier? It wasn’t really any thought in particular, but just everything. In the last two days in my head I have worshipped her, fantasised about her, stalked her – when I was sure she wasn’t stalking me – called her a bitch, married her, deserted her, returned to her, nursed her in her old age and buried her – when she wasn’t burying me. She has made me smash up my flat with her habit of delayed response to messages. All this craziness and I still don’t even know the slightest detail about her, like if she eats meat, even if she does work in a carvery. I am certifiably insane and it’s only fair that she knows that. Or maybe this is what everyone goes through when they meet someone new? Maybe she is feeling the same way about me, though I can’t help but doubt it. The last time I tried to make an effort on her behalf, I ended up inventing a new scheme for not going back and checking my door, so perhaps I should do the same again today. I will try to be good natured and easy going today and maybe by our date tonight I will be a new man, a better man. There couldn’t be a sterner test of my ability to be a good man than a train journey into the capital. The things that people rush around for, the jobs they cram themselves into sewers to get to, the clubs they drink in – none of them really matters beyond the M25, which encases London in its own self-interested fury. London is Dorian Gray, enjoying the excess and exuberance of its own assumed importance, while the world rots and festers somewhere upstairs in the attic.
It's Not Me, It's You Page 15