Limbering up

We are gathered here today...

After a year’s sabbatical spent on the beach in Brisbane, Australia, I returned to my desk at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust with a heavy heart.  England was cold.  England was dark.  In the wake of the Olympic and Paralympic triumphs, England was – dare I say it – depressing.

Always one to wallow in misery, September was spent Bridget Jones-style curled up on my sofa listening to power ballads and flicking through our anthology of photos, pining for my former life.  My girlfriend valiantly concocted projects to distract me, gamely suggesting I whittled our photos down to a manageable selection for friends and family and take up baking.  We drew up a list of the places we’d missed in the capital and set about ticking them off, a whirlwind tourist trail that renewed my love affair with London and my hatred of its weather.  “Don’t you think Big Ben’s more atmospheric in the fog and rain?”, we’d muse optimistically, trying not to recall the sensation of staring out over Sydney Harbour in 35 degree heat.

I tried, too.  I had lived a very simple life in Australia, at one with myself and the world, and I had a duty to recreate that in the UK.


I added a morning swim to my daily routine, which worked for a spell.  Then I caught myself pretending that the nonagenarian gaining on me in Seymour Leisure Centre was actually a Great White and realised it was probably not the best form of escapism.  Next up was a light box, and having pored over the reviews of thousands of happy customers on Amazon I was surprised to discover on its arrival that it was just, well, a light box.  Its principle method of curing Seasonal Affected Disorder seemed to be replacing it with the sort of blinding headache that comes from sitting a ruler’s distance away from an object designed to replicate the retina-burning glare of the sun.  Not today, thanks.

September drew to a close, the temperature dropped seemingly forty degrees and with it my petulance.  I was sick of it.  Sick of the weather, sick of the grey, but mainly sick of myself – I’d survived 90% of my life in this country happily enough, after all.  It was time to stop trying to replicate Australia from the confines of our Brixton bedsit and instead seize everything that living in London Town has to offer.

Thus motivated I switched off the light box, threw off the boardshorts and crammed the last remaining packet of Tim Tams into a pantry now brimming with the products of my over-zealous baking.  I blew the dust off my old phone book and looked up a friend from a charity I used to work with, arranged a time and place to meet and set off confidently into my London future. 

I was going to enroll in the London Marathon.

(But first I had to pop back to the flat to drop the photo album off.  Maybe a ‘top 10,000’ wasn’t quite ambitious enough whittling.  Lesson one: You can’t run the marathon with a hernia.)