THE BRITISH 10K LONDON RUN
(Chip time 00:57:58)
Yesterday I ran 10 kilometres, in the mutually supportive company of 25,000 others. It was a personal first.

‘The British 10K London run’ does exactly what it says on the tin. It celebrates its city, and there’s queuing at the start.

For a first-timer, the weeks of technology preceding a major race day are pleasing. A fat pack arrives in the post. In tandem the related website displays a 3D route on which a turquoise disk whisks its sleek way between historic landmarks, along the roads to be run. It is the stuff of hypnosis. It comes close to precluding the need for participation.

The day came. At a Sunday morning hour at which, ordinarily, I would not be conscious, I was at Embankment tube station. The area was a configured star of veteran and one-off athletes replete with sport-top water bottles and mobile phone wielding relatives, dividing at tangents in the quest for loos and coffee stalls.

Safety-pinned sheets of A4 (on the reverse of which emergency contact details were penned for the event of collapse) displayed race numbers while red electronic chips sat proud of trainer laces, ready to register the time at which each person passed the start and finish lines.

The runners did not come in a standard shape. For every sinewy biology drawing physique there were angry curves. Charitable causes painted the crowd fluorescent: OCD and Alzheimer Society text alongside the somehow more emotive photographs of lone individuals in whose name the race was undertaken. A weather warning (extreme heat) had stipulated no fancy dress, tempering that very British need for the hairy to put on a tutu.

It was not, for me, an altruistic enterprise. The instances on which I have asked my friends to show their support for a selected cause with money seemed too recent and too many. I am stowing brownie points for a Channel crossing. This was a question of whether I could do what I had set out to do.

Ploddingly slowly, batches of people were ushered towards the arched start on Piccadilly. The ‘gun’ and we moved. A shot of elation carried me along Pall Mall, an element of nodding to the crowds, inner dialogue telling me they were there for me. The relatively small proportion of their time which would be spent with their runner in view lent this credibility.

‘Muscles have a memory’, my pacer had told me. Did mine know, half way along the Embankment, on the return lap, that this was distance unremembered? We were in a tunnel which swallowed the available air. 7k and my legs were buzzing with the need to stop but not enough for me to fail to appreciate the novelty of throwing an empty water bottle to the side of the road. In a society in which anything thrown is known there was a freedom to this. The discarded plastic crunched underfoot.

As we approached Parliament Street 'Chariots of Fire' blared from unseen speakers. 'I vow to thee my country' segued into a more buoyant 'Land of Hope and Glory', confirming this as an event neither for the nationalistically self-conscious nor anyone who can picture Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams.

Where did the final sprint come from? The finish in view, something in me remembered.

Much red, white and blue razzmatazz at Trafalgar Square and Horse Guards Parade. I felt proud, the 'goody bag' and primary-coloured medal small beside the achievement.

At the post race meeting point, my wonderful mother met me. She thinks I should be a year younger than I will be on my next birthday and doesn’t know where the time has gone. I don’t know where it went either. I trap morsels of it in hours in which I do as I did yesterday.

This is my year for sporting feats in which the muscles remember and the memory follows.

TUNNEL VISION

Londoners are perhaps never more so than on their daily tube journey.

On entering an empty carriage, newcomers target the seats at its extreme ends, a strategy meaning that only one side of each individual risks physical contact with another person, the other being boxed off by the non-flesh, glass partition or solid end shelf.

I too strive to maintain my separateness. I sit, mind in the Aegean (a beloved spot on one of the larger Cycladic islands), bottom on the bald burgundy cushion cover of the Hammersmith & City line and wonder if each of my not so fellow passengers is housed in a small, impenetrable world.

A woman sitting opposite me posts a small square of milk chocolate into her mouth and makes a vigorous action of rubbing and cleaning her fingers, hands outstretched, as if to dissociate herself from the eating. It is vaguely irritating.

Someone I can't see is battling with a mobile.

I put on my make-up. Is doing this acceptable? In a recent newspaper article its author mourned the loss of mystery that has seen women frowning into small square mirrors, fluorescent mascara wands in hand, in the public arena of the London Underground. I applaud mystery and on the occasions when I have risked eyelash curling, have wondered whether this risks ‘too much information’, but mystique has been a necessary casualty of my early alarm. 'Women should just get up 10 minutes earlier', instructed the writer. Well, 'no'.

As the pink line passes from media to finance, the satchel journalese bags are fewer and the recently shampooed heads of the city boys are many. They rarely look up. I often fall in love on the tube. There is ample time for it.

My free paper tells me that someone 'with tastes entirely compatible with my own' could be opposite me, now, the way to him being a simple matter of a two way ‘app’ on our mobile phones. It seems, equipped with this mutual technology, we would recognize each other. I don’t think the man I am looking at needs apps.

Stance is everything on the underground. For pre-accepted intervals we duck and wedge ourselves in the knowledge that for those 20 minutes we will be nearer to another’s armpit than is likely to be a choice. We see pores up close, are forced to overhear conversations about how ‘Sandra is doing my head in’ and we hold our collective breath.

Within this, however, the ‘same book’ instance runs as a gentle thread. The second novel of a cult trilogy is balanced on my lap. The first in the series is in the hands of the man two seats down. It's the boy wizard all over again and can be called a phenomenon. I adjust the way I am sitting so that the title of my book is visible. It produces a shy smile and I am saddened for the late Swedish author who cannot know how he populates the Hammersmith & City line.

My upward glance lands on a poster. A London university that could change your life, another asking that you change it yourself, a third letting you know of the natural disaster whose duration matches your journey time. ‘By the time you’ve reached…..another…..will have contracted..’. There is the journey you are making and the many you are not. I am at a lonely moment in things, 43 and seeing ‘ahead’ unpunctuated by what people call life events. On a second glance I think I will give the charity a call.

My neighbour is now reading my paper, by stealth, over my shoulder. I offer it to her. “No”, she says, “thank you, but don’t you find it leaves print all over your fingers?”.