Trevor's Blog

It’s funny how sometimes people sat on a hobby horse miss the fact that the world has raced past them on a rocket. When I was Director of Ethics for the National Council for Hypnotherapy I worked with other like-minded people for about four years to rescind the rule that banned therapists from using client  testimonials. To me the reasoning didn’t make sense. Most common was that clients were vulnerable and couldn’t be trusted to give informed consent for their words to be used. Whenever a client left to get back to raising their children, running their company, doing their job or coping with their illness it struck me as strange that I let them go off and do that, but wasn’t able to trust whether they were mentally competent to write an opinion about our work together of their own free will. The next most common was that testimonials were falsifiable. And so they are, but any dishonest act was catered for within our code of ethics. It reminded me of when my gym banned all children from the waiting area after my children had sat quietly and read there for years while I trained because two children had misbehaved. I hate lazy management as much as I hate organisations restricting the freedom of its members by failing to trust the integrity of the majority. So we worked to change it and, against a background of sometimes hysterical opposition, we won the day.

I thought that was the end of it, until I heard the other day that someone is trying  to reinstate the ban. They’ve missed something: A ban on clients providing feedback to the public about the quality of our service has been taken out of our hands; they’re doing it anyway for themselves. An excellent example is a blogger called the Moiderer. She tells me that moidering means to whitter on endlessly about nothing in particular – which you’ll see if you read her is far from what she does. She flew from Scotland and has seen me three times for issues that many would believe required long-term therapy. Her blog seems to put the lie to that. If you read back through her entries I think you get a wonderfully inspiring and honest account from someone who did what I need for therapy to succeed – she engaged with me. She gave it everything and applied the theory of my approach to her problem. It wasn’t easy, but she proved it was possible to leave behind traumas from childhood and reinvent herself as a happier person. And she blogged and tweeted every step of the way, so it was a very public bit of therapy. Does it strike you as a bit bonkers that a ban on testimonials would have her account in the blogosphere but me unable to link to it? And if I am allowed to, why couldn’t she write it for me to put on my wall if I so wished? What would be the difference?

Another example is the extraordinary Darin McCloud. I had the honour of running with him in the Great South Run in October in support of Diabetes UK. Why that charity? Because when he came to see me diabetes was just one of his issues, and at the core of them was his obesity. He was 21 stone and had been lambasted in the press for bringing their attention to the fact that he was putting on weight in order to qualify for a gastric bypass – a known cure for diabetes. He was abused for pointing out the anomaly that six miles up the road he was fat enough to qualify, but in his home town he had to gorge himself to reach his PTC’s weight criteria. Madness. So Sandra at Thinking Slimmer got in touch and invited him to come to see me. I’ve seen him twice, once in my office and once in a park. He listens to a Slimpod (a 10 minute recording) every night. He’s lost 5 stone since our first meeting s nearly a year ago AND his insulin levels are now within normal range. i.e. to all intents and purposes at this moment in time he doesn’t have diabetes. And, because this is the kind of man he is, he’s signed up to run to help others. His next race is the London marathon. Like the Moiderer, he did what I asked. He engaged and took responsibility for his side of the therapy journey. It doesn’t matter how good I may be, if a client wants to block me they can, and sometimes do. He also blogged about it, as you can read here. In fact Thinking Slimmer have just filmed him, so you can even see him (a lot less of him, obviously) speaking about his incredible transformation. The testimonial door cannot be closed again with so many horses able to jump it, tunnel under it, or just ignore it. My point, other than to highlight the fact that people have within them what they need to achieve amazing transformations – and often quite quickly – is that time has moved on and therapy needs to move with it. I can’t pretend it’s always comfortable for clients to be blogging about their latest session, but it’s not about my comfort, it’s about their improvement, and if blogging helps them, more power to their keyboard.

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy we see therapy as simply a particular form of personal development – a normal part of the life of anyone who has a desire to change themselves. We don’t see clients as victims of anything, and we believe they have everything they need to be who they want to be. Therapy unlocks that potential – but it’s the clients who have the key, we just hold the torch while they find it. Personally I think the more light is shed on the process of therapy the more the public can have confidence in who they go to see. People inspire people, and psychology has proven that the opinion of our peers is one of the strongest convincers for us of the right action to take. What better way to sort the therapy wheat from the therapy chaff than to hear from people who’ve experienced it? Which is obviously one potent reason why some therapists would be against it.

I guess a New Year blog from someone like me is supposed to be about setting goals and suchlike, and I’ve certainly gone down that road in the past, but I want to say something else this year. Not that I’m saying goals are anything but a good thing – in moderation; you could have a goal to build a great garden and be so focused on the goal you never smell a single rose. That can’t be good.  What’s in my mind this time is how what we give to the world can contribute to someone else’s goal, even if we never meet them and don’t know of the contribution we’ve made. So this isn’t about goals, it’s about me setting some hopes for you.

The background to this is me realising a goal that I’ve had in some form or another since I was a small boy. I remember in my first class when I was about five the teacher would give us a sheet of paper and scissors and the afternoon to create something. On each occasion I would cut the paper into squares, sew them together into a book and start to write and draw a story. Books were magical things in my childhood, things that took me to better places, and authors were almost mythical in the distance they seemed from ordinary humans. I wanted to be one.

I wrote stories and poetry into my early twenties, and then shut down for a good number of years, only beginning again when my life began to emerge in the form it has now.

This year I achieved my dream. I got a contract to write three books from Hodder and Stoughton – a company whose books I’d read as a child. I became an author. Now it’s weird to say that, because by then I’d already written three books, all of which have sold well within their niche, so most people would already consider me to be one, yet somehow being contracted to write, being paid for words I hadn’t written yet, felt very different. And I like the feeling. I have a membership card for the Society of Authors in my wallet that makes me ridiculously pleased when I look at it. The boy in me is having a really good time.

Now this should be a story of a goal realised through a goal setting procedure. But it wasn’t. I’d written a book about relationships about 14 years ago and had it rejected by over a dozen agents and publishers, so it was resting in a drawer and I was too busy to be pursuing a publishing deal. One of the things we were busy with was the launch of a company called Thinking Slimmer with a friend called Sandra Roycroft-Davies and her husband Chris. The plan was to make available to the public a weight-loss download of my creation that would do away with dieting and create in the listener a better relationship with food. As part of the promotional work I was interviewed by a journalist from the Evening Standard. It was supposed to be about how listening to me for ten minutes a night was a more cost effective and healthier option than a gastric bypass operation. Instead the journalist, having got wind of a conversation Sandra was having, twisted it into something else. I was used to attack an organisation I’d been proud to be a member of, the Metropolitan police. You can read about it here if you haven’t already.

Here we get to my first hope for you. This year, I hope you take action. If anything happens you don’t like, or something isn’t happening that you would like, take whatever action is available to you to change it. TO YOU. Personally, take action. Don’t leave it to someone else, sit and hope things will change or be a victim of the situation. A sense of choosing your response helps you in any situation, however small the degree of control it may actually give. As a way of life it will change your life.

My first action was to complain to the editor, which received the kind of brush off you’d expect. My second was to write a blog about it. A true case of David and Goliath: my few thousand readers against their circulation of 750,000, but it made me feel better. At least with the internet we small people have some means of having a voice. I had no plan C.

Now we come to my second hope. I hope you spread kindness whenever and wherever you can. The newspaper article had suggested I’d compared myself to Derren Brown, a complete and very annoying lie. Unbeknown to me two friends emailed him with a link to my blog and Derren did me the huge kindness of tweeting  it to his 750,000 followers. All of a sudden my voice was as loud as the Evening Standard, and our site crashed within seconds from the thousands of hits. Neither my friends or Derren needed to do that, it was just kindness. And it changed my life.

Because my third hope for you is that you have a stroke of luck. One of his followers is a woman of discerning taste with an exquisite eye for literary talent. She read that blog, and some of my others, and emailed me casually asking if I’d be interested in writing books for a wider audience. Her name is Charlotte Hardman and she works as a commissioning editor for Hodder. Would I like to write for a wider audience? Let me think…

I met Charlotte and her boss Mark Booth, and we came to an agreement (obviously he shares her discernment). Three books over two years, one on… relationships(!), one on weightloss and one on…well, it’s about raising resilient children but it’s for everyone.

So my point is this. If you take action it may or may not get you what you want, but it’s better than waiting for life to throw something at you. You’ve got to be in it to win it, as they say. But that’s often not going to be enough, there’s a host of talented people who deserve the cards to fall kindly for them this year, but they won’t. Some of them are reading this. This could change; we could all be each other’s dealer. If we all resolve to become even kinder, to go out of our way a little as often as we can to do a service for someone else, if we all connect through acts of kindness, acts that don’t lead obviously back to direct reciprocation, then we’re all likely to strike lucky just that little bit more often. And in the nature of the Butterfly Effect, just  a little more kindness, creating just a little more luck, could change the world massively. You could make the difference to someone’s life that transforms it, even if you never know.

So, take action, spread kindness, and harvest your luck. Happy New Year.

After less than a year in the marketplace it’s brilliant news that the weightloss downloads developed by Trevor in collaboration with ThinkingSlimmer have had such an impact already. It’s particularly pleasing because the philosophy is all about forgetting diets and creating a healthier relationship to food. As a true lifestyle change it means the weight you lose can be permanent. You can see what else is hot here: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/3992713/Read-Sun-Womans-diet-trends-for-2012.html

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Quest has a growing network of great Cognitive Hypnotherapists, many of whom are making great inroads into increasing the public’s awareness of the benefits our approach can bring.  I always get a buzz seeing people we’ve trained appearing in the media, and this article by Kirsty Hanly is a great example. Click here to get some great advice:

This is a blog that’s been sitting like a lead weight in my stomach. The shortest way to start it is just to say that we put Wilma to sleep. So many of you contacted me with messages of support following my last blog about our remarkable little pet that I knew I’d have to share this with you, when all I really want to do is put it in a quiet little place while the scab thickens.

Still, a thing I’ve learned that has helped me through a lot of things is the idea that when one door closes another opens. I use it with my clients to help them gain perspective on the bad things that litter their past, but we’ve found it can also help with a present misery; not just to wait for a new door to open, but to actually choose a door that might lead to something good coming from something bad and turn the knob yourself.  So this is about that, rather than just me howling at the moon.

Despite our hopes to the contrary, Wilma was in decline. While we waited for lab results from Italy identifying a degenerative nerve disease, the evidence of something amiss beyond her two-brainedness was building before our eyes. Her anxiety increased to a point where it was nearly ever-present – on one occasion she circled the kitchen table for three hours without us being able to distract her. The only relief she seemed to get was when she played with Betty, or in the evening when everything slowed down as we watched the TV. She’d either fall into an exhausted rest on my lap, or crawl onto Bex’s chest and sleep like a baby. She became ever more obsessive – food being her last fad; she lived for the routines of meal times, or morning coffee which she joined in with us with a favourite treat that she wouldn’t let us forget.  At the same time her incontinence continued unabated, as did her barking at each and every sudden sound or unfamiliar visitor. There didn’t seem to us to be very much quality to her day, it was just something for her to survive. It was no way to live her life, but it still felt a massive and dreadful  responsibility to choose to deprive her of it. Mercifully, after we’d finally grasped the nettle, something happened on her final evening that was awful and yet reassuring: she lost the use of her back legs for about twenty minutes, something we’d seen hints of for several days. We knew then that we were right.

We took her to our lovely vet Alastair, who saved her for the first time at 11 weeks of age, and who struggled not to join in the tears. All I can bring myself to say about the event itself is that the first thing she did when we met was lick my nose, and it was the last thing she did as we parted. Sad, sad, sad. It is an appalling thing to see beauty die by your hand, however sound you know your motivation to be.

And so I want to move quickly on to the door that opened. Betty and Wilma had formed a friendship that, while odd, we felt she would be sad at losing. We’d also discovered that two dogs are more than twice the fun of one. And so, a week before the date we booked with Alastair, we brought home another puppy. Fred – obviously we had to keep the Flintstones theme going but I’m not going to shout “Pebbles!” in a public park, and Bex didn’t fancy Bam Bam. It worked. In just a week he and Betty became inseparable – interestingly he never once approached Wilma – and heartbreakingly for us, Betty seemed to move away from her too. It was a bitter-sweet week where we could give her the best of our attention and love in the knowledge of what was to come.

But we definitely opened a door. Perhaps as a defence mechanism we have fallen deeply in love with them both, as individuals and as a pair. They are a delight. Fred is a feisty, cheeky little boy whose tail wags every time he catches your eye, and Betty – nicknamed ‘practically perfect’ – at only five months old has absolutely taken on the mantle of older sister. Just their very normality after Wilma brings a pleasure. Just to see them drink water is a reason to pause and smile, while watching their playing takes up an awful lot of our day – notice I didn’t say wastes; I’m sure the chemicals they release in us are wonderfully beneficial.  Although every time I watch them my mind briefly flicks to Wilma and I get a stab of sadness about what we hoped her life with us would be, already when we speak of her it’s about the things we loved about her, and anyway, I want that sadness for a while. Neither of us regret the year we had. She helped us get through the loss of Barney, and she brought Betty and Fred into our lives. And more than that, I think sometimes you grow just by caring for someone who needs you. Whenever she relaxed in my arms I felt privileged that I made her feel safe, and I’m sure Bex felt the same way. We all gained from each other, and we’ve all lost, but life is a series of ups and downs, and sometimes you just have to accept that some downs have particularly steep slopes, don’t you?  I know I over-attach to dogs, but like Winston Churchill once remarked about alcohol, I take a lot more from them than they take from me. Love is worth the loss. The question that helps me through it is, what can you turn the loss into? On this occasion the answer was more love.

Interestingly the weight has disappeared from my stomach now I’ve written this, which reminds me of another thing I’ve learned: Never leave difficult things ahead of you if you can avoid it; put them behind you as soon as you can.

So, bless her heart, she was an awesome little life, and she can rest easy now. And I’d like you to look through the door we opened and say hello to our little Flintstones.  May we be blessed with many years together.

Our job as agony aunt and uncle on the Jeni Barnett show BBC London 94.9fm (apart from us hating that description) has been one of the new things of 2011 that we’re enjoying the most. I pinched myself on Sunday when I turned to my left during the broadcast and looked into the studio next door to see Tony Blackburn doing his programme. I used to listen to him on the way to school, just as I used to watch Jeni on TV before going to work. It’s funny how life turns out. Anyway, this week we were asked to talk about relationships – and nobody rang in! Good experience because we had to keep rolling, and lucky to have someone as experienced and talented as Jeni to hold our hand, and it gave us a chance to talk about some of the ideas I’m covering in my new book, Lovebirds.You can listen to it by clicking here

Ten months ago I had a therapy session with a wheezy fat bloke. I’d been asked to see him by Sandra, the founder of Thinking Slimmer, who had contacted him after he’d been crucified in the press for suggesting that he should put on weight to get a gastric band operation that he had been told would cure his diabetes. In his Health area he needed to be fatter, six miles up the road he didn’t. He went to the press with this anomaly, and they turned it into ‘fat lazy bastard eating himself even fatter to beat the NHS waiting list.’ Darin is a traffic warden in Portsmouth, so you can imagine how that helped him walk the streets, and he became so self-conscious about leaving the house and people pointing that by the time he arrived at  my door he was quite depressed.

The fact that I’d recently been used by the press in pursuit of a vendetta against the police gave us an instant affinity; the fact that he’s an immensely likeable guy didn’t hurt. And so began our journey. In ten months I’ve seen him twice for Cognitive Hypnotherapy to help him get rid of obstacles to his progress – the ones that exist only in our heads – and he’s been listening to a Slimpod that I developed for ThinkingSlimmer. He also received lots of support from some other great people along the way – nobody more so than Sandra, who seems to have a personal vendetta against fat and was in regular contact with him. But overwhelmingly it’s been Darin’s hard work, which he wrote very honestly about on his blog.

By the time we stood on the start line for the Great South Run on Sunday he’d come down from the 21 stone he was when I met him, to 16 stone. A comparative racing snake.  Not only that, he’s come off his drugs for diabetes, which is amazing. He’d gone from never lacing up a trainer, to committing to a 10 mile race. He’d gone from being a figure of ridicule to a bit of a local hero. It was an honour to keep him company.

The run itself was fabulous, and I can’t encourage people enough to do one. It was wonderful how many people came out of their houses to cheer us, how many kids wanted to slap our hands as we passed, how many inspirational stories you could read or infer from what people had written on their backs. 23,000 people, most running for someone else. That’s a lot of good energy to connect to. It doesn’t matter how slow you make it, you’ll be glad you did. You even get jelly babies at the nine mile mark! What’s not to like?

I don’t suppose I can imagine how much it meant to Darin. He overtook three people he’d never beaten before and crossed in 2 hours 3mins by my Garmin, which paused the time automatically when we had a comfort stop. That beat his previous best by a long way. All along the route people were calling his name – what a change from 10 months ago when they called him something else. My old friend Gil Boyne was fond of saying “Energy can’t be destroyed, it can only be transformed”, and how right he was. When bad things happen to us, the only thing to do with it is transform it into something better. “How can I use it?” is a mantra I repeat in the face of any setback until I find a way, and Darin is a fabulous example of what this attitude can bring. I look forward to seeing what he does with the energy from this event to move him even further. Whatever it is, it’s his choice. Nobody can make your life or ruin your life; you always have the choice of how to respond to what happens to you. I hope others see Darin’s example and ask themselves, “Who would I be if I followed his example?” Because the only person stopping them is them.

If you watch the video (click on the link below) you’ll see me raise his arm as we cross the line. Everybody who crossed it won, his was just a victory I can tell you about.

I know it’s probably rare for a blog that usually focuses on therapy issues to turn into a health report on a little dog, but a lot of you have asked me for an update on Wilma, and this seemed a good way of doing it. And if you’re interested in the brain I think you’ll find it interesting even if you don’t care about dogs. Which is a therapy issue by the way, because all well-balanced people do.

Quick backstory: We met Wilma 11 months ago when she was two weeks old, very soon after losing Barney, the third member of our marriage. Without doubt she was an attempt to fill the void that followed us around the house and as such we projected onto her a raft of hopes and dreams of a future together, and sublimated our grief into love for the adorable baby of the litter who popped her big-eared head from out of her siblings and made us choose her.

Looking back now there were signs that she was different from the beginning. She didn’t seek our faces as dogs usually do, she circled anti-clockwise before emptying, and she seemed to have no instinct against messing in her bed. But we hadn’t raised a puppy in years so thought it was all going to correct itself with time. Then at 11 weeks old, in the space of a day, she collapsed into a coma. As bad luck would have it I was in London so Bex and Jan drove her to a nearby vet hospital where she spent three days on a drip. The vets never got to the bottom of what it was. Dehydration was the symptom, and a virus was vaguely suggested as a cause. We breathed again and moved on.

From then we realised that she didn’t actually drink water. If we flavoured it with goats milk she would, if it was running water she might, but she had no apparent instinct to respond to thirst. On several more occasions we had to take her to the vet for rehydration treatment because of lethargy and disorientation. And along the way we realised we had a ‘special’ dog. She continued to have no compunction about messing her bed, or indoors if she couldn’t immediately get into the garden. She was obsessive, about the cars passing the house, about running water – I twice had to wade into a stream to rescue her – and flies, to name a few. She would endlessly pace in circles –always anti clockwise or dig in the corner of the kitchen. Meeting new people would send her into manic barking which would last as long as the meeting. She was high maintenance, and it was exhausting.

Two months ago we bought her a sister – Betty – partly in the hope that a companion would soothe her anxiety and maybe teach her more normal dog behaviour, and to a degree it was very successful. They love each other and Betty definitely distracts her, often by hanging off her tail. At the same time we returned to the referral hospital about the behaviour and the refusal to drink and they suspected from her blood tests that she had a liver condition We were due to begin treatment for that prior to a biopsy when we returned from holiday.

In the event we had to fly home early. Six days into it our brilliant dog-sitter Lesleyanne took her into the vet. Again she had become dangerously dehydrated, even though she had been diligently given enough water. She was admitted to the hospital again where, 4000 miles away we were given various diagnoses of meningitis, liver disorder, and ‘we just don’t know’. We decided to fly home.

What followed was a week of waiting for them to find something, which they finally did after four days. An MRI scan detected two abnormalities in her brain. The first was strangely shaped ventricles, and the second was she has no corpus collusum. For those of you who don’t know, this is the rope of nerves that connect the left and right brains and allows them to share information. To be honest we were stunned. To be honest I think we still are, not so much that it’s that that’s wrong with her, although it’s incredibly rare, but more for how she copes with it. Suddenly, instead of our focus being on her strangeness, we marvel at the things she manages to do that are normal. You’d expect her to be clumsy, but actually she’s amazingly nimble and lithe. She connects with us, and has learned a range of verbal commands. In most respects and on most occasions she passes for a normal dog. I find myself fascinated by her, watching her and trying to figure out what she’s having to do to understand her world – and what we can do to help her. Here are the things we have so far connected to her condition, and the guesses we’re making about them in the absence of any research:

• She has never been able to hold a chew in her paws, we hold it for her. Obviously the left and right paw can’t act in a coordinated, planned way (normal movement is under the control of her cerebellum, not her cortex). She has learned to pin it under one paw instead.
• For the same reason she’s never learned to climb stairs. Actually, that’s quite handy.
• She’s never liked being stroked and arches away from being touched. Now we’ve found that if you just stroke her on one side at a time she loves it. Also, to slow our movements so she has a chance to catch up with what we’re doing.
• We’re guessing that in a dog their right brain is more dominant which is why she circles left, and why she runs much faster in that direction. From what I’ve read split-brain patients have faster reactions than usual because there’s not an assimilation delay. It explains her incredible speed, and her occasional error.
• Novelty scares her – like new people. In the absence of a coordinated cortex perhaps it takes more time for her limbic system to settle. We’ve read that short term memory is reduced in split brain humans (like Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman), so that might be part of it – she keeps re-scaring herself in the presence of the same stimuli. Once she knows you she loves you forever, so how can we accelerate this? We’re going to experiment with getting her to smell something from one of us on someone new to see if that anchors her to a feeling of safety and recognition.
• She has a poor sense of smell in terms of being able to follow a trail. Each nostril sends information to a different hemisphere, so perhaps this is why. She tracks insects on the floor until they disappear under her muzzle, and then she loses them.
• The same is true for her ears: she can hear brilliantly and is acutely sensitive to sudden noise and high pitched voices, but she can’t not pinpoint where the noise comes from.  When we call her we always wave as well.

Every day gives us more ideas to test to help her world be more knowable to her, and we’re taking each day at a time, because, unfortunately it’s not the split brain that is our biggest worry.

There is a possibility that, along with having no instinct to drink (which is connected to split brain) she doesn’t absorb water properly either, so she’s in a permanent state of dehydration. We worry that her frantic digging and pacing is a sign of distress or pain. That’s not something she should have to live with.

Also the misshapen ventricles can be a sign of a particular kind of nerve degeneration called NCL. It’s fatal, incurable, and would make the rest of her life short and miserable. She had three biopsies, liver, gall bladder and lymph, and this condition is also so rare that they’ve been sent to Italy for diagnosis and we won’t know the results for a month. What is on our side is the odds of her having two such rare conditions, but when they’re both to do with brain malformation they seem more like variations on a theme to us, so we’re holding our breath. I won’t bother going onto what could still be wrong with her liver.

And of course while we do that Wilma gets on with her life. Despite us telling her to take it easy and not risk her stitches, she fights with her sister and jumps onto the sofa. Unlike us she sleeps soundly, of an evening on my lap, completely oblivious of the excruciating joy that brings. She gets excited for her walks and continues to try to throw herself in the stream. And she’s put five days of what must have been an incredibly stressful hospital stay behind her like it never happened. I aspire to dealing with life like a dog. They deal with what happens, don’t make it about them, and move on in the hope of a biscuit. If there is a heaven I think it’s more likely to be for dogs than for us.

And she effortlessly continued a dog’s cleverest trick – getting us to love her even more with each day that passes. Which is the opposite of what our heads want, but, for better or worse, that’s not what we’re joined to her by. While our thoughts predict difficult days ahead, our hearts hope. So we’ll try to live each day in the way Wilma does. You find lessons in the unlikeliest of places.

Thanks you for all your good wishes, we’ll let you know how she’s doing.

We’re very happy to have become Jeni’s resident Agony Aunt and Uncle – reducing it, rather than increasing it, we hope. The subject this time was anxiety, and Bex and Trevor share a Cognitive Hypnotherapy perspective on the issue, along with some tips on how you can take more control of your fears. The songs and news have been edited for brevity, other than the song ‘You’ve got a friend’ by James Taylor; not because Jeni tricked Trevor into singing, but because it felt a crime against music to delete him. Click on the link to listen: Jeni Barnett show Sept 2011

I got up to run a half marathon this morning.

By 6.45am I was in the fens, surrounded by a glorious morning. The wind had dropped – sometimes it takes the tail of a hurricane to make you appreciate stillness – and the air had the definite bite of Autumn. Not long now before a T shirt will replace my vest, but I didn’t mind because I knew that once the sun got its act together and got over the horizon, like it was threatening to do, I’d be warm enough. I think it does the body good to adjust to different temperatures rather than pamper it with constancy. The sky was blue and surrounded me like only a fen sky can, even the moon had stayed out to cheer me on.

The first part of the run is a long concrete road about 2 miles long that cuts deep towards Wicken Fen. The only reason for its existence that I can think of is that it served one of the scores of airbases during WWII, and as I run I often imagine jeeps with aircrews bombing towards the village for a pint of warm beer. The fens feel so timeless that it’s easy to feel them passing you.

This morning it was like nature was escorting me. Out of a tree a marsh harrier swooped ahead  and flew with me in its wake for about a hundred yards. I thought I’d spooked it until a deer jumped across the road in front no more than thirty feet from me. I wondered what kind of omen that would be if their were gods to send them. I decided a good one.   Later a mother and her bambi stopped to watch me pass. I waved. I might have got a nod in return, I can’t be sure.  Squadrons of partridges scrambled from cover, rabbits ran for it, even a charm of goldfinches hopped along the fence ahead of me for a while. It was absolutely glorious.

One of the things I’ve learned from running is to get the boring things in life over with first. When I’ve reversed my route and done this road at the end it’s been a real struggle. I’ve also found that predictable routes, where you can see the future uninterrupted, is similarly boring.  Seeking variety and uncertainty in your run is as important as it is in your life, it’s the twists and turns that add interest – as much as your brain may prefer the increased ability to switch off when ahead of you you only have more and more of the same thing.

Along the way I tend to do a blog in my head, or work on whatever else i’m writing, or just talk to my Grandad. He’s been dead, blimey, thirty years, but he remains one of the most important people I’ve had in my life. I tell him all the good things that are going on, what our plans are, what I’m look forward to. I think it helps to savour the positives in your life, and telling him of them works as a happy way of doing that. I even remembered a lovely memory of him. He taught me how to play chess, and we had many great evenings hunched over the board. As I got older we played less. I was competing in leagues by then and, with the stupidity of youth, didn’t find him much of a challenge any more – as if that’s what the games were ever about. But I remember when I was about 15 I played him one evening. I was beating him hollow and brim full of arrogance. And then he moved his rook from his back row to mine, and checkmated me. It punctured my hubris and he was cock a hoop.  I treasure the look on his face. I hope he knew how much I loved him, because I didn’t know the value of saying it back then.

I know it’s probably strange for someone who doesn’t belief in life after death to talk to someone who’s gone, but I think the mistake is to think that as individuals we’re consistent. Psychology shows time and again that we’re a mass of contradictions, and that we work hard to delude ourselves otherwise. I’m happy to hold opposite views about things and wheel them out according to which one works best for me in whatever situation I’m in. They’re only beliefs, and beliefs just feel true rather than are true, so why not use them any way that improves your life?

Because I set off before breakfast ( a Freddie Frog doesn’t count) at the halfway stage I had a couple of Quality Street to keep my blood sugar up. I need to experiment with my in-run refuelling, but I have to say they worked pretty well, I was feeling great. I’m getting back towards civilisation by then. Out on the fens every rare driver who passes me slows and gives me a wave or a thumbs up.  Towards the village not so much. Most are still courteous, but some will make you stop when crossing a side street rather than them have to make the effort of pushing on a pedal, or slow their progress by a few seconds. Similarly the people walking their dogs nearly always give me a sympathetic hello, while those getting their kids to school just tend to ignore me. The moral seems to me, don’t have a child, get a puppy. It’s at times whenIi see the village, head down, going off to work that I bless the day we became self-employed, and I bless the work that Bex and Jan do that gives me the flexibility to organise my day the way I do.

The last mile is hard because I’m pushing for a personal best. I do it. Only my second run at this distance and my watch tells me I did it in 2 hours 5 minutes. I’m pretty chuffed, that’s five minutes faster than last time. I begin to wonder just how fast I can do the marathon, which is a lot better than when I wondered if I could do it at all.

A half marathon before breakfast. I wouldn’t want to do it every day, but what a gift to be able to do it at all.

A magical start to the day.