Everything gets recorded these days. I’m sure there are blogs devoted entirely to running. (There are.) I shall include my running in this blog as a way of tracking my own progress (or lack of it).
Week one
Back to Monza park, leaving the bike in a hedge and running round a field a few times (two, to be precise). My lungs heave with effort and my legs seem incapable of lifting my feet off the ground. I remember pre-season rugby training at at school. This lungs-legs things has always been my problem.
Week two
This round the same field thing is getting a bit tedious. I know why I do it - one reason is that I don’t want to end up somewhere I can’t get back from, and the other is that I feel nervous about leaving the bike in a hedge. I decide to run the other fields nearby too. All of this is thrown into doubt by an electric pain in my ankle. I would have ‘shot’ up in agony if my legs hadn’t been so heavy. I picked a bee off my ankle and heroically ‘ran through the pain’. On my second run of the week I manage to go further and not got attacked by insects. My head feels boiling red at the end of it but later I get that tingling sensation in my legs of having done a decent bit of exercise. I’m still running less than 5 kilometres though.
Week three
I’ve worked out I can probably manage two runs a week. As I go round the field with Lo Scrittore in it I start thinking of what my objectives are. Mainly to do things like reduce blood pressure and generally get fitter in order to avoid keeling over of a heart attack. But then I start to think of more detail - run beyond thirty minutes and then try to get it as far as an hour; if I managed that how much further would I be able to manage? I add targets like running without staring fixedly at the ground in front of me, observing the surroundings. Like extending my stride length and getting more bounce in my legs.
At the end of the run I’ve done 4.5 km and I’ve gone for 21 minutes without feeling too desperate. Now I have to build on this as a starting point.

It’s not often, well never, that I see something on TV and feel obliged to run to the keyboard and write down what I felt. Always a first time, eh?
I’ve been watching the interview with ‘the most in-demand face in the world’, Natascha Kampush, the Austrian girl dragged off the street and imprisoned for years until she managed to run away the other day.
She has panels of psychologists at her sides whom she frequently refers to. There are panels of psychologists on all of the TV channels here. You have the feeling they’re leaping at the chance to play the television psychologist, displaying a full range of televisually interesting eccentricities. But let’s deny them the benefit of our acknowledgement.
What they seem to think in common is that she has grown up to her 18 years through television. Television is her way of communicating with the world. That’s why she wanted to be on TV. She keeps talking about ‘responsibility’, but they’re not too clear on that one, that’s because she’s fucked up. They mention this sense of ‘responsibility’ as really being a sense of ‘guilt’, for what, they don’t know. Oh well, Catholic psychologists, guilt… inevitable. But I think they don’t have 9 year-old daughters.
This young woman has clearly chosen herself clothes for these interviews. It must be part of her ‘treatment’. She’s dressed in a most amazingly purple way - her hippy shirt, her napkin thing on her head. She’s been watching TV and she’s decided to dress like a cartoon character. This is how she’s lived for the last eight years. She’s one of the Winx. She’s done what I know Marta would have done (and of course that's what fascinates and terrifies me).
Inventing stories, imagining the future, thinking of that moment. Regretting that row (‘regret’ isn’t quite the word) with her mother, regretting that she didn’t cross the road when she saw that man hanging round on the street corner. Regretting that she’d got into those rows with her mother in the first place. Imagining how she would stop other girls getting into the trouble she found herself.
Are you ready for all of this at 18? Are you ready for it ever? Do you have the language for it at 18? Is it a surprise you glance to the people there at the side who are to support you? Can you be sure that you’ve got the right language to be able to make people understand? When you escaped into those back gardens, no-one seemed to understand what you were talking about. Maybe you’re talking gibberish.
The girl has expressions that I see Marta and her friends make. Those faces of helpless incomprehension. ‘You tell me what I want - I don’t know.’ The eyes closing up at the difficult question. She’s still ten - she hasn’t had the life to make her eighteen. At least, she hasn’t had her own life to make her eighteen. She hasn’t had the full range of awful characters making her suffer; she’s just had one torturer.