Nightmare Dog-Owner Graduates School(-house)

May I speak about my great running week first? I've had two 15-year Personal Bests. Having kept at it since last summer, I finally got a run below 7 minutes per kilometer, 6:58 to be precise. Babies crawl that fast, but you know how childish you can become as you age. And I did my first 10K run today. O.K., 9.5K; I need to dream up a new course.

We are selling our house, the Valley School, as it translates into English. Or Combe School if you're English. Funny, we've lived here for fifteen years, at least 3 times as long as I've ever lived anywhere, but I feel no regret at leaving it.

We are going to build a straw bale house. (Please, we've heard all the 3 Little Pigs jokes.) And we're building it ourselves. If things go well, we will be leaving the schoolhouse in August. If they don't, we'll be leaving sometime, anyway. We don't have land, yet, but we have hopes and will keep you posted.

More than posted. I am setting up a new blog, name to be decided, to journal our activities. In France, anyone who is building their own house (un auto-constructeur) blogs or joins bulletin boards. They share techniques, budgets, resources, mistakes and other joys of building with like-minded souls and some of the like-minded souls show up on your building site to learn and to help.

We, in fact, have been helping some friends in the next village build their hemp brick house. We've learned a lot of what to do and what not to do. When their house is finished, they will help us. (Don't feel that you have to be a friend or acquaintance to volunteer. Anyone who wants to help will be welcome. Free room and board. How hard can it be if I'm doing it?) Last week we spent a day plastering (clay and lime) a 6² meter of this house to learn the technique. And learned more of what to do and what not to do. I feel certain, however, that there are plenty of mistakes left for us to make, too.

Nothing daunted, armed with little cash, several animals and a ton of books on straw bale building, we march forward.

Ah, no, we don't yet know where we're going to live in the meantime.

Colonel Blimp and the Burnham Jogger

We are about to embark upon a string a non sequiturs. Fear not. It will all come together in the end.

Item. You may not know Colonel Blimp, the eternally annoyed, jingoistic creation of the cartoonist David Low. But do check the link, so you know what the Colonel looks like. There is also a marvelous old Powell/Pressburger film about him. Highly recommended: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Item. Do you know that your local newspaper is always desperate for stories? Desperate! They'll print anything. Call them up and tell them your dog ate scrambled eggs for breakfast. They'll print it. They aren't disposed to wait for Man Bites Dog. Dog Bites Egg is just fine. Fill that space!

In fact, I didn't telephone, but Maidenhead is a small town and the Maidenhead Advertiser found out about me. An American in England. (Yawn.) A woman. (Oh, yeah?) And a manager. (Got me. That was unusual in England in the early 80s.) The Advertiser sent a reporter to my office/house to interview me. She started with my age. Newspapers always have to know how old you are. They have this in common with race directors.

The reporter brought a photographer. But a woman sitting at her desk in a linen suit is bor-or-ring. Would I mind changing into my running clothes and we'll go to the tow path and photograph you there?

What the hell. I change clothes and we go down to the Thames and I sit on a rock. The photographer photographs. I sit elsewhere. The photographer photographs. We go for an action shot. The photographer photographs. I pose in front of the houses of the rich and famous. The photographer photographs.

You're waiting for the photograph, aren't you? Sorry. I don't know where the newspaper article is. But after it appeared in the paper, the reporter telephoned me to ask if I would like a few of the photographs that didn't appear. There were some wonderful ones," she said. "Much better than the one we printed, but we couldn't use them. Still, I thought you might like see."

And she was right. I went to collect the pictures. It was worth taking up running. Here I am: Burnham Jogger with Colonel Blimp.

Fair-weather Skier Part I

As I lie in bed with a groin injury that prevents me from walking for a time, my friends and enemies question my good sense. Over the past 20 years, I have ruptured one ACL and torn the other, the meniscus in my right knee is rattling around unpleasantly, and I have a bad back as a direct result of the first ACL injury. O.K., as a direct result of my own stupidity and stubborness -- while recovering from the first ACL injury. And yet, as soon as this injury heals, I will be out running, again, and when winter comes, skiing. At my age, shouldn't I know better?

Here's my theory. There are two ways I can be crippled: I can continue to run and ski, and chance becoming physically unable to do either. Or I can stop now, crippled by fear of what may happen. The end result is the same: no running or skiing. Why not wait for the real thing?

Why I run is, maybe, for another post. But I ski because, much to my astonishment, I love it. I, who, despite the misleading impression I may be giving, am not athletic; I, who hate the cold; I, who am miserable getting up early; I, who detest standing in queues; I, who, above all, am chicken; love to ski.

All through my teens and early 20's in Chicago, I resisted skiing. When I lived in New England, I resisted skiing. When I moved back to Chicago, I resisted skiing. Then I got this new boyfriend? And he skied? Well, you know how that is. Chicken, here, didn't want to say she was afraid for fear he'd dump her.

So, one morning in Atlanta, we get up at 5:00 a.m. -- hey! I stay up until 5:00 a.m.; I don't get up at that hour -- and we get in the car to drive to North Carolina. That's right, I learned to ski in North Carolina. Looked at one way, mud has advantages. It helps you to stop. The disadvantage is that it makes you stop kind of fast.

So we're in the car and I'm sulking because I'm scared, both of skiing and of being found hopeless, but I'm sulking discreetly because I don't want to be caught sulking, either. It was a long ride to the ski area, sulking, and there wasn't enough coffee in the world to make it better.

First stop, equipment. Boots. Here's the thing: I have square feet. Literally. 4 x 4. As a child, my mother used to come home in tears after trying all day to buy me shoes. I would be in tears when my father was ordered to take me out and he bought me brown oxfords. All the other little girls had pretty little patent leather shoes with straps across the top. The maid would be in tears because she had to dress me in those brown oxfords. Even if a pretty little patent leather shoe wide enough for my feet had existed, the strap would never have reached across my instep. The arch of my foot was so high, I only made two unconnected halves of a footprint. As I got older, my father became worn out and suggested that I buy boys's shoes. Or why didn't I just wear the boxes? Salesmen cringe when I walk into a shoe shop. My friends will never go shopping with me after the first time. (The first time they don't believe me.) I moved back to the country just so that I wouldn't have to buy shoes ever again.

Anyway, boots. To get them wide enough, they had to be too long. This is not the ideal fitting for control on the slopes.

Next, skis. These days, when modern technology has made skis so easy to turn that you just step onto them, let slip and enjoy the ride, the correct length is somewhere between the height of your mouth and the height of your nose from the floor. When I started skiing, shortly after the wooden models were retired to the museums, you determined your correct ski length by raising your hand straight up in the air and measuring to your fingertips. As the skis were so much longer and so much harder to manoeuvre, this ensured that you stayed in class for the rest of your life, trying to learn to use them. Ski schools have to stay in business, too.

So here I am: booted, after a fashion, and standing on these planks, with sticks in my hands. I couldn't move. Not from fear, although that played a part; I just couldn't figure out how to move my feet, which were now almost two meters long. And heavy. And didn't bend. My boyfriend took one elbow, the guy from the ski shop took the other, together they raised me off the ground, carried me to the ski school, and plopped me down. Boyfriend says he'll be back for lunch and leaves me to it.

I am the only adult in a class of children -- a dozen 4-year-olds and two kids who turn out to be an 11- and 12-year-old sister and brother. Now I am not only terrified, I'm embarrassed.

The instructor separates us into two groups. I'm with the big kids. As the three of us wait for the instructor to sort out the babies, the 12-year-old (boy, of course) looks up at me with a malevolent eye, and demands,

"Is this going to take long?" Like it's my fault we're here.

"Why?" I answer. "You in a hurry?" (You little creep.)

"My father says," he says, "I can't go up there," pointing at the equivalent of Mont Blanc, "until I have a lesson." ('Course it's your fault. Grown-ups are all in league.)

"Shut up, kid." No, I didn't say that. But I thought it.

Finally, the instructor gets back to us and takes us to the top (top! ha ha!) of the nursery slope. I have no memory of how he got me there, because I was still incapable of locomotion on my own. But there I was, at the top, looking down the vast expanse (ten meters?) of baby slope (baby flat?), being instructed to turn my toes in and go! I think he pushed me.

I went.

And I never wanted to stop.

It was unimaginable freedom and lightness. It must be what hangliders search for, or pilots or sky divers. I was flying. No, I was floating. I was floating and flying.

Then you spend the next 30 or 40 or 50 years trying to recapture that feeling.