Thursday 16 April 2009

No Chance of A Sick Note? - Simon's Training blog

There's no going back now. The costumes have been delivered. We've got our race numbers. Even Jeremy has completed a 20 mile training walk. He may never be the same again but he has done it nonetheless.

Short of something really, really major, I'm going to have to do it now.

So on Easter Monday I set off, by train to Margate. Even a grey Bank Holiday morning was not going to dispirit the throngs of people heading for one of Britain's premier seaside resorts. And as is the custom in these parts, there was a "meet and greet" party organised by the local populace eager to show visitors "dahn from London" a traditional Margate welcome. Although unwilling to miss out on this I had twenty miles to do and so set off, with 20 miles ahead of me and a spring in my step. Only one more training walk after this one.

Beyond Margate there is not a lot to divert your attention - that is to say unless you are easily held enraptured by Lawn Bowling - a local derby was about to take place and there was a certain amount of menace hanging in the air, in clear anticipation of old scores to settle. Some of the players were so obviously pumped up on cucumber sandwiches, Lapsang Souchong and Battenberg that they were undertakening quite alarming stretching exercises. The whole thing looked liked a geriatric haka. I gave it a wide berth.

The stretch between Margate and Minnis Bay is actually rather lovely. There are some stunning cliff-top properties with glorious uninterrupted views out to sea. And at Birchington there is a real curiosity - ask anyone where the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti is buried and nearly all would rightly think Highgate Cemetery - in fact its as Birchington's small and unassuming little church - about as far from Highgate's vast City of the Dead as you could possibly get. And as I swung by to pay my respects I discovered he died 127 years ago last Thursday.

After Birchington, and the small but perfectly formed Minnis Bay which is a great place to get a cup of tea, there is a monumentally long slog down to Reculver. In an effort to while away the time I invented a whole new game. You have to match the people you pass with the celebrity or historical figure they most physically resemble, but the rule is that you can only give yourself 4 seconds to do it. So I had (in no particular order) Hitler, Mussolini (barely 25 yards apart), Tom Hanks, John Major, Janis Joplin, Mr Macdougall from Magic Roundabout, Charlie Drake, and the Andrews Sisters.

Later I was to see Orlando Bloom, but since he was being pursued by adoring teenagers waving autograph books, I concurred that in fact that this really was Orlando Bloom (he comes from Canterbury and is still grounded enough not to wander round Whitstable with a comedy moustache and massive Ray Bans).

All morning there had been a metereological battle going on between the sunlit inland and a haar fog in the North Sea - as I hit the stretch between Minnis Bay and Reculver (fuelled by a cup of tea in the excellent little cafe), the fog began to flow in, so that the twin towers of Reculver looked even more Gothic and eerie than usual (even though they are Saxon..). Beyond Reculver the fog began to clear and above me I could hear skylarks as I climbed up the slope towards Beltinge. In the space of five minutes i saw a little Egret, (more at home in North Africa), a Brent Goose (more at home in the Baltic, although i think thats where he was headed) and a canary (more at home in its cage in Herne Bay probably but had obviously got out.)

And then, before I knew it, I was in Herne Bay. PG Wodehouse in his Jeeves and Wooster novellas decided that Herne Bay was the place where the inestimable Jeeves, armed with a shrimping net, took his holidays. I have always thought that this fact is something hugely underplayed, to their cost, by the local tourist authority, who choose instead to promote the claim (of fairly dubious merit) that Bob Hope (as a child) once fell off its pier.

Barely 90 minutes later and I'm home. Admittedly it is going to be a whole different ball game once i am inside a 17kg donkey costume along with jelly Babies, water and other sunbdry comforts, but I have to say, that after all this training I am really looking forward to it!

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