Time on my hands – Pour passer le temps.

The clocks have swung back an hour.

Blindboy was complaining about this the other week.

He reckons it causes problems for women.

His argument was that some women are put-off by running in the dark and with the closing-in of winter and its further hastening by the enactment of DLST society isn’t helping.

There is more to this narrative, and you will have to listen to other Blindboy Podcast episodes to get a better understanding of his approach to concepts such as toxic masculinity, chauvinism, inequality, and sexism. Let’s just say, he is, I believe, on the right side of history.

And yet, because of all this jiggery-pokery with time and clocks, it is lighter in the morning.

I will soon don my winter-layer wetsuit and head-out into the waters of the Dearne Valley, dodging pike, pebbles, and elodea.

My dogs are fed, they are quiet and resting.

I have an hour to go.

How often do we find time on our hands?

My experience is usually either inadequate hours in the working day to squeeze-in all that I need and want to do or otherwise periods of ennui, torpor where there is the time, the capacity but my will is lacking.

Fortunately, the more I exercise, the more active I am, the better my ability to manipulate time in my favour and so, when there are gaps I can either chill or do.

You might not be interested, and this could potentially be over-sharing. Since March I have been getting fit. It has been a post-Covid, return to my levels of action of a decade ago.

Something happened in my 40’s that took me out of the running – both literal and figurative.

20 years ago, I ran the Sheffield Marathon. There haven’t been many since as the hilly city (like Rome, it has seven hills – it even has the Peace Gardens which can give the Trevi a run for its money (on a hot day)) – from recollection a man died that year from overheat and cerebral oedema.

It wasn’t the fear of a swelling brain that put me off running, merely the demands of work and family, life getting in the way of life.

I don’t have any regrets.

I was 50 this week and I feel better than I have done since I was in my 20’s.

I guess, had I been active the past decade I might now be looking for a knee-joint replacement. You can’t undo the past and there is no value in such reflection. Unless that is, you have some way of travelling into the past.

Has anyone read Stephen King’s 11/22/63? It is the story of a man who travels back in time from modern-day ?the 2000’s to the 1960’s to prevent JFK’s assassination. I loved it. There is a Netflix too.

Ever since I watched Back to the Future in 1989, I have adored the concept of time travel.

I remember watching the first in the trilogy at my brother’s house in Cubert, Newquay. A strange memory for one whose grasp of the past is at best patchy. I recall being entranced, pulled-in to the notion of time-loops and quantum experiments . Ah the good old days. More recently I watched If I hadn’t Met You which played to my romantic inclinations.

Enough.

Off to swim.

Have a good week everyone!

Rod’s VO2 Max!