Running under planes
Friday, August 06, 2004
We live near Gatwick airport. Far enough away that we're not bothered by the noise of the planes but close enough that when I go for an early morning run I can watch the planes circling above the airport waiting for the curfew to end.
When you look up at the planes they appear just like a child's representation of a plane (or, if you're like me and can't draw, one of my pictures of a plane). There is little or no sense of perspective and they seem to fly on their sides, one wing pointing down, the other up. This morning I counted six planes making a pattern in the sky like a small flock of slow-moving birds.
The running is a recent thing. Like my blogging, I've started a few times in the past few years and given up. My plan this time is to be fit enough to run a marathon by this time next year. I may not actually run a marathon but I'd like to be fit enough to do it! That's probably some sort of cop-out, of course, a way of sabotaging my plan before it begins.
Last week's TLS carried a review of two books on a speech by Lincoln in New York that more or less won him the Republican nomination for the presidency. Spurred on by this I started reading Gore Vidal's Lincoln,a copy of which has been sitting unopened on my shelves for some years. So far I'm enjoying it. But thinking of Lincoln's great speech made me realise how little speeches now matter. Which is probably just as well for people like George Bush, who not only can't write a speech of their own but also struggle to deliver the words of so-called professional speech writers in a coherent manner. Tony Blair is a much better communicator, of course, but the essence of what he communicates is as vapid and nebulous as anything dribbling from the mouth of Bush.
When you look up at the planes they appear just like a child's representation of a plane (or, if you're like me and can't draw, one of my pictures of a plane). There is little or no sense of perspective and they seem to fly on their sides, one wing pointing down, the other up. This morning I counted six planes making a pattern in the sky like a small flock of slow-moving birds.
The running is a recent thing. Like my blogging, I've started a few times in the past few years and given up. My plan this time is to be fit enough to run a marathon by this time next year. I may not actually run a marathon but I'd like to be fit enough to do it! That's probably some sort of cop-out, of course, a way of sabotaging my plan before it begins.
Last week's TLS carried a review of two books on a speech by Lincoln in New York that more or less won him the Republican nomination for the presidency. Spurred on by this I started reading Gore Vidal's Lincoln,a copy of which has been sitting unopened on my shelves for some years. So far I'm enjoying it. But thinking of Lincoln's great speech made me realise how little speeches now matter. Which is probably just as well for people like George Bush, who not only can't write a speech of their own but also struggle to deliver the words of so-called professional speech writers in a coherent manner. Tony Blair is a much better communicator, of course, but the essence of what he communicates is as vapid and nebulous as anything dribbling from the mouth of Bush.
