11.30 am – 7.00 pm

 The third annual Out of the Blue Music Festival is set to take place this weekend, on Saturday 2^nd July in Everton Park, showcasing the talent of musicians from the Everton area and across the city. Headlining the event will be Johnny O’Connell, the Stan Smith Band and children from In Harmony, along with the Bo Weevils, Hope Jazz Workshop, Samba Beat, and many more. The festival also offers a whole host of family-friendly activities, including zumba, football skills, alternative therapies, craft making and drumming workshops, so there’s plenty to keep everyone entertained.

The whole day kicks off at 11.30 am with the Blue Run, a family fun run for all ages. Entry costs £1 or £2 if you’d like a Blue Run t-shirt to wear with pride! The run is a mile long, or 2 miles for those over 16 years old and brave enough to take on the challenge. If you’d like to take part, contact Kate or Paul at WECC on 0151 282 0303, as soon as possible.

Why not come along for a fun filled festival which will see a section of Everton Park packed with a lively array of creative arts, drumming, music and performances. A day not to be missed!

For further information, contact Paula Kearns at WECC on 0151 282 0303.

Dr Johnson’s account of the first day of his tour describes the excitement felt at the prospect of finally visiting the Western Islands of Scotland and his joy at finding the perfect travelling companion in Mr James Boswell. Describing Boswell as a man “whose acuteness would help my inquiry, and whose gaiety of conversation and civility of manners are sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel,” the pair were well-matched to face the travails of the journey ahead. I’m sure that Phil and Sheena will find similarly delightful travelling companions in each other.

Good luck to Phil and Sheena, and let’s hope that the Scottish weather is a little better than we’ll be enjoying over the next few days!

This weekend, Sophie, Sam, Eleanor and Anna ventured down to Hay festival. Hay is a small town on the border between Wales and Herefordshire, which every June is host to one of the biggest literature festivals in the UK.

Simon Armitage had the audience in stitches as he read poetry from various collections. We were captivated by the rhythms of his poetry. They seemed so natural, especially read in his soft Huddersfield accent, yet Simon told us he writes for the sound of the poem: when he has finished redrafting the poems there are rarely any words left the same from the first draft.

‘You’re Beautiful’ was our favourite poem. It has many down-to-earth, comic observations and juxtapositions that made everyone laugh:

You’re beautiful because you drink a litre of water and eat five pieces of fruit a day.

I’m ugly for taking the line that a meal without meat is a beautiful woman with one eye.

The repeated lines slowed the pace, and created a sincerity which was very moving.

Afterwards we got to meet Simon and had a photo taken with him. He was a little reluctant to be in the picture, but I think he enjoyed it!

Children’s author Michael Morpurgo was another star of the show. For an hour and a half, Michael retold War Horse, accompanied by songs and music. It was captivating. We were particularly impressed with his ability to do accents, including French, German, Welsh and Devonshire!

Fighting off small children, Eleanor and Anna met Michael Morpurgo afterwards, who was very friendly and looked fabulous in Eleanor’s hat.

Our Read was also there, distributing copies of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s, The Unforgotten Coat. Joined by some new Our Readers and some familiar faces, we enjoyed a short reading from the book, followed by Our Read themed activities. Design your own Unforgotten Coat went down a little too well with some, with fantastical creations bordering on Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat produced, whilst tackling the most difficult wordsearches ever created became a matter of pride for others!

Take a look at some of the pictures from the day.

After a lengthy detour, in which I mulled over 18^th century attitudes to charity and tried to find a connection between Johnson’s Sermon IV and sponsored bike rides (unsurprisingly, with little success), I came across this fantastic quotation which, I think, describes Phil and Sheena’s efforts perfectly:

“Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.”

Whilst Phil and Sheena will no doubt need a little strength to cycle 504 miles in two weeks, what they’ll need most of all is perseverance by the bucket load. When it rains (as it inevitably will), when their legs ache, or a slope is just that little bit too steep, I’m sure their powers of endurance will be tested. But, as Dr. Johnson himself declared, the performance of a great work requires perseverance, and, I think we can all agree, Phil and Sheena’s tremendous efforts to support Get Into Reading are definitely a little bit great.

To support Phil and Sheena, please visit their charity giving page and give as much as you can towards Get Into Reading.

This time, the idea came to him as he and Jane chatted on a train to London to meet the publishers Walker Books a year ago.

“I have this notebook which is my ideas notebook, and I had three or four really good, what I thought were really good ideas for stories,” says Frank.

“And on the way down to London on the train, for some reason I just started talking about this girl, Misheel, who’s a real girl.

“Jane said, ‘that’s the story I want in the book’. And I went well, it’s not actually a story, it’s just something that happened. I’ve got these other really great stories that I’ve worked out.

“But she said ‘no no, that’s the one’.”

Read it in full here.

Here is a photo of Frank, with Fiona McDonald from Walker Books, just after the contracts were signed for Our Read:

“All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.”

From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.

A good number of years ago, at the beginning of an ill-fated love affair, I found myself watching the sun set with a certain person on Otterspool promenade.

There was a moment when everything in the world seemed still and the Mersey was bathed in orange loveliness. The river literally glowed. I looked towards this person and thought I had felt in that instant, our souls fuse irrevocably together.

The memory of that moment stayed with me. It was a memory I used to justify continuing something that was most certainly not good for me.

The turning point came when, during ‘a long night of the soul’, I recalled that moment to the person I shared it with. They took a very long time recalling the incident. And they remembered it very differently to me:

The River Mersey does not glow and if it did, it would be the result of some accidental nuclear spillage.

I can laugh at this now. But at the time the words metamorphosed into the image of a huge anvil falling down from the sky onto my fragile skull. That sentence became the slogan for why we would never work as a couple.

I suspect everyone has moments like this. Moments when they may have romanticised or fictionalised a meeting of eyes across a crowded room, or exaggerated the meaning of a stray brush of a hand. But alongside the painful, destabilising doubt that often accompanies these moments, the possibility – that what we have felt is shared and not just a figment of our imagination – is a wonderful helping of much desired joy. And a heightened sense of being alive.

The following poem by Fernando Pessoa never ceases to remind me to enjoy feeling first and not to let the ambiguity of knowing/not knowing get in the way of that joy.

There was a moment

There was a moment
When you let
Settle on my sleeve
(More a movement
Of fatigue, I believe,
Than any thought)
Your hand. And drew it
Away. Did I
Feel it, or not?

Don’t know. But remember
And still feel
A kind of memory,
Firm, corporeal,
At the place where you laid
The hand, which offered
Meaning – a kind of,
Uncomprehended –
But so softly…
All nothing, I know.
There are, though,
On a road of the kind
Life is, things – plenty –
Uncomprehended.

Do I know whether,
As I felt your hand
Settle into place
Upon my sleeve
And a little, a little,
In my heart,
There was not a new
Rhythm in space?

As though you,
Without meaning to,
Had touched me
Inside, to say
A kind of mystery,
Sudden, ethereal,
And not known
That it had been.

So the breeze
In the boughs says
Without knowing
An imprecise
Joyful thing.

———————–
Fernando Pessoa from ‘Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems’ English translation by Jonathan Griffin

Thanks to everyone who sponsored, especially Guthlac and Ecgfrith : but are you real? Or are you those two heroes in one of the Anglo Saxon travel-writing tales I read in my first year at University – you went on a round-the-world trip (well, a round-the-world-as-the-Anglo-Saxons-knew-it-mainly-Denmark-and-Frisia trip) and discovered strange tribes drinking fermented mare’s milk and racing out of the village for the remnant when a man died – the remnant was his widow, if my memory serves (it may not).

Guthlac and Ecfrith, you may be related to my colleague Patrick Fisher, who certainly resembles some kind of Norseman, especially in his pink headband. Be that as it may: you kindly sponsored the TRO team for twenty-five English pounds, whether you are real or merely historical, many thanks to you. And to everyone who has sponsored, helping us raise 102% of our £1500 target.  Many thanks to all.

So – race day: what happened?

Put it this way, I was in the Walk In Centre by 7.00am on the Wednesday after the race.

Was it a variation on that mysterious pain in the shoulder blade I’ve had on and off since my dear old friend Angie told me she’d had one, about 17 years ago?

Was it, as the Walk In Doctor with a paperback third volume of Winston Churchill’s autobiography flat down on his desk, said, ‘Oesophagitis’?  … ‘The patient may demur,’ he mused, clearly remembering his third year diagnostics course, ‘And insist the pain is muscular…’ I didn’t. I was fascinated and horrified at the thought of stomach acid burning my oesophagus and thus causing a yowling pain under my shoulder blade whenever I turned over in bed. Churchill reading doctor prescribed very expensive stomach-lining pills.  But when I told my GP cousin that I had a terrible oesophagal pain in the back only days after completing the 5k she snorted down the phone and said ‘You’ve got a pulled muscle! Put a hot water bottle on it and save those stomach lining pills for when you want to go out and do heavy drinking!’

The hot water bottle worked.  I still have the pills and rarely do heavy drinking. Please contact me if you need them.

So – race day: what happened?

Put it this way, it all started going wrong the day before race day when I did my final training run.  I had a new route, avoiding the hill (see Director’s Fitness diary no 2), and bringing me back along the beach.

Ah, dear novice 5k attemptees, avoid the beach.

But I didn’t know that then. I have walked on this beach at a moderate pace for 14 years and I have seen people running – I have seen Stan Van Den Berg (are you Guthlac and Ecfrith, Stan? You are a Norseman? Or perhaps Dutch?) running on the beach. So it didn’t even occur to me that my fast-walking-odd-seconds-of-running routine transposed to the beach might be dangerous.  But so it turned out.

The dangerous beach

It was raining. There had been a very high tide. The beach was unpleasantly hard and ridgy. My trousers were sodden and flapping. It was so wet that I began to feel sorry for myself again and gave up counting and stopped to gather photographic evidence of how wetly difficult it all was…

my wet trouser leg

I staggered on, moaning now – what else could I do? I had to get home somehow. And the injury? I didn’t feel anything at the time  - which was about 8.00am. But by 8.00pm my Achilles tendon was gently throbbing and I knew I would suffer during the Event.

So – race day: what happened?  Lovely day, sunshine, no rain, very gentle breeze: conditions I would imagine as near as perfect as could be. Everyone turned up and we were off! Chris was the only visible chicken and for while I could see his chicken head and shoulders above the mass of runners as they all sped away from me.

But then by 1k it was just me and the road. And a few other people, who seemed to be going very slowly indeed, yet faster than me.

I remembered all the good advice you’d all given me and just set myself to enjoy it, which I did, apart from the very small twinge in the Achilles tendon on my right foot.  I met up with the lovely Clare Williams and we enjoyed a fast walk together until first she and then I set off at a gentle jog trot.  We stayed together most of the way – not talking, not even in sync but occasionally passing each other and rolling our eyes in desperate greeting.  In the first 1k, Damian waved us off on the north face of the Liver Building, and as we entered 3k it was wonderful to see Grace Farrington (here she is dressed as Queen Elizabeth I during our training course at Burton Manor – do ask!)

Grace F as Queen Elizabeth I at Burton Manor

on the river side of the road waving and smiling – we both stopped for a hug and walked, ran, on.

Now our supporters, fresh from their refreshment (!) really hove into view, Dominic and Phil and Ben and Tina, all cheering us on and using what seemed to me violently exhortatory language. It reminded me of being in labour. You think in advance that you will want supporters, but when they speak to you, from somewhere so very far from your present place of pain, you just want to punch them.

The final k was a blighter. Lungs not working, no air, bollard thighs, the usual problems, plus the tendon was by then actually hurting.  I saw Max Alder on the Southside side of the Liver Building (he’s given up smoking and done a marathon! What more could a human being do for health! ) and his waving  smiling quite surprising presence really spurred me on – he’d come here, unrelated, no blood between us, to wish me well! Thank you, Max.

On limpily, lumpily I went. In the home straight I started to feel disorientated: like Captain Oates or some other South Pole hero, it had all been too, too much, really, and then my son appeared and ran alongside me.

‘Is it this way?’ I asked him, on the pleasurable edge of giving myself over to be looked after by someone more capable in charge of me (this is what very old age will be like I suppose?) and why he found that funny I do not know.  And then the others were all there, all done, all panting, drinking their water and waving and cheering…. and then that was it.  ‘She’s smashed her own PB’ I heard one of young men shout (they didn’t realise my previous times were 6K times, so even with a sore tendon, I was likely to…and I let it pass, as I wanted to have smashed my own PB, for by now vainglory and smug self-aggrandisement seemed somehow my right.

‘My heel’s hurting’ I told them (putting a brave face on as if it wasn’t really hurting) was guided gently but patronisingly towards what looked very like ambulance manned by paramedics with stretchers and defibrillators.

‘I’m not going in that!’ I protested. ‘It’s for massage,’ they said, ‘You can have physio.’ But I refused, which was just as well, as we saw the physio/massage tent later, flapping breezily on a lawn, not looking at all like an ambulance.

All the same the physio-lady took one look and refused to massage me, advising sternly ‘Go home and put ice on it.’

Which I did. Fine, no probs, went to bed with a packet of peas and by Monday morning all was well. And all remained well until at 2.00pm on Monday afternoon when the Oesophagitis/pulled muscle came on as I sat at my desk. Chance?  Random? Self-inflicted? You decide.

My dear old friend Angie certainly thought there was no chance in it.  ‘You can’t just run,’ she said, ‘At your age.’ (We have known each other a very long time).

‘I was mainly walking’ I countered with dignity. I didn’t tell her about smashing my PB.

‘You said in that blog that you’d run!’ she retorted, eyebrow raised.  ‘No wonder you’ve got that mysterious pain in your shoulder that I had seventeen years ago.’

What next, I hear you ask. Well, when I was at the baths I saw there’s this thing you can do where you swim the channel – in the baths, over several weeks, but still 23 miles…with goggles. Can’t wait.

How have small squat people survived? Surely when the prehistoric clan ran away from whatever new danger presented itself people like me, grumbling along at the back muttering ‘ I can’t, I can’t, I can’t go any faster!’ got eaten by tigers or pterodactyls?

So how come I am here, labouring up Caldy Hill at 7.00 am, 10 minutes into my training session, scowling at car drivers who are probably laughing at me, and muttering to myself ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t go any faster…’ What kind of natural selection malfunction do I represent?

People like me can’t run, and that’s an end of it. We can’t even walk very fast.

My legs hurt down the front outside edge of my shins, and my thighs, despite Angie’s steel spring optimism (see our pledge page: http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/ourread) seem to be made of concrete bollards. But it is the lungs which are the real problem.  This bodes ill, and not just for the event.

Note I’m not calling it a race as for me there’s no race in it: the event is simply a painful occurrence in universal space-time like the Black Hole at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the shipwreck at the beginning of The Tempest: something to be got through without dignity but with as little disgrace as possible. The ill boding, however, stretches far beyond the Our Read 5k on 12^th September and throws a grim shadow over the rest of my slow squat life:  for the truth is – damn my early devotion to tobacco – my lungs don’t work.

When I try to breathe through my nose, as the delightful Sophie Povey instructed me at lunch yesterday, nothing happens. Yes, there are nostrils, and some kind space in my throat where I can feel air passing but after that… nothing, or at least nothing bigger than a pair of ancient leather tobacco pouches. If I open my mouth and really suck in air these foul pouches expand to resemble the two shrivelled balloons I found down the back of the couch three years after the party. Which tells you something about my housekeeping and the infrequency of Davisite parties, as well as my lungs.

My rudimentary grasp of human biology tells me that is why the thighs don’t work: how can they, with no oxygen in them?

All of which is very negative and so I appeal, dear supporters, for psychological tools or even a loan of will power. What do you do when, like the spirit of anti-Nike,  you just don’t want to do it?

When I did my training on (I think) last Monday I couldn’t post a blog because  I was very downhearted. Exactly the same route took longer than the first time. I had expected continuous improvement!! For a woman with shrivelled balloons for lungs who started out  heaving two concrete bollards up a steep hill and then staggering after them as they rolled down the other side, I thought things could only get better. But no, they got worse.

I can’t post the picture of my stopwatch or my sad self as haven’t worked out how to add pictures to blog – perhaps that will come. But:

52.10 !

Grrrrr: 19 seconds longer!!!

And the fact that those 19 seconds had tipped my time into 52 minutes was horrible. So I didn’t try again all week. Or rather I tried easier, shorter routes and didn’t time them, not merely from disappointed petulance, but also because of poor organisation. And you know what Toddy Hockeymaster used to say ‘He who fails for prepare, prepares to fail.’ Well it’s true, damn his eyes.

On a happier note, wonderful encourager as she is, my colleague Clare Williams got me to go for a swim with her on Thursday night after work. That was rather nice – my first time in the University baths for possibly 20 years. I was very surprised, and a little frightened, as we passed through the new gym extension, to see how hard everyone was working on treadmills and steps and huge silver balls and the like. For the swimming I wore my goggles, and Clare refrained from comparing me to Ali G, which was typically kind of her. The water is warmer than it used to be, and at 5.15p.m., it wasn’t full of fitness fanatics. And the thighs, the thighs turned from concrete to cork! We forgot to count but think we might have done about 20 lengths – a gentle doddle. I will certainly do this again.

Perhaps my DNA missed out prehistoric two-legged-human being, and really I am something naturally anti-deluvian, made for splashing about in the sea?

Thanks to everyone who posted encouragement and suggestions.  As you can see, nothing has helped. Keep ‘em coming. And please, sponsor me, readers.

To that family member who offered  more cash  if I ran all the way I can only say, ‘Are you trying to turn a good fun Sunday 5k into some sort of Greek Tragedy? Son kills mother by turning her own desire for Reader gold against her?’ Come off it, boy. Just give me an extra quid for every second I knock off my hoped-for time (not yet decided).

Though they do register fairly high on my personal scale of everyday things that annoy, I’m not so cruel that I set out to squash the life out of said flies, wielding a makeshift fly swatter as a weapon; if one flies into my line of vision or personal space, I’m more likely to wave my hand rather weakly to allow it to drift off somewhere else for a few seconds. Of course, it does depend on the size of the fly – that’s not so easy to do with a super-sized bluebottle. But even then, I’d prefer to open the door and coax it back to the wild outdoors than to end its days with a swift slap. I can’t say that my caring nature extends to wasps, who I insist on being obliterated if they dare to enter (by someone else, obviously – I’m too much of a wimp to risk incurring the wrath of those devilish beings).

Maybe I should be a little more sympathetic to all insects, whether they be harmless or slightly more threatening, inspired by my revisiting of this piece by William Blake. In his Songs of Innocence and Experience Blake examines many aspects of our natural world and considers various parts of the animal kingdom – the imposing strength of the tiger, a creature perhaps sinister and brutal yet mesmerising; contrasted with the tame, gentle and innocent lamb. Through the comparison of these animals, Blake highlights the often contrasting facets of life. As enraptured with nature and everything contained within it, Blake also chooses as a point of inspiration a thing as seemingly insignificant as a fly. Indeed, straight away Blake himself concedes that the fly is by all accounts unimportant, a mere speck used to being thoughtlessly brushed away. But, as with all of the ‘songs’, Blake then ventures to look deeper, pondering the state of the human existence through that of something so much smaller and apparently pointless. His asking ‘Am I not a fly like thee?/Or art not thou a man like me?’ brings into question: just how exactly superior and important are humans? Are our lives really all that significant, when they can just as easily be interrupted with the brush of a ‘blind hand’. It is interesting to consider the similarities – or differences – of the ‘thoughtless hand’ that swats away the fly, with the ‘blind hand’ – perhaps of some ‘higher power’ – that touches a person. Maybe such ‘hands’ are needed to give us reminders not to be so careless, a consequence to our frivolous actions. Perhaps us humans are the biggest irritation of them all – more often than not, we certainly annoy each other more than any insect does – and we could learn something from ‘a happy fly’. Whatever meanings are to be found it does seem rather appropriate that a poem about an apparently inconsequential thing opens up to produce so many possibilities. And rather sobering, as well as partly amusing, to think that we may be part of a hierarchy; the equivalent of an annoying fly to something, or someone else.

The Fly

Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

William Blake (1757-1827)