Summer in the city

Colchester is officially a city now but as I had to head into London today, I mean the Smoke.

It was approaching the mid 20s as I lumbered off to the station carting a rucksack containing my ancient, breezeblock laptop, in the off chance I would do some work at the conference I was attending.

(Reader, I did!)

I'm even less great in the morning than I used to be. Not a morning person. Not an afternoon or evening person either.

And definitely not a heat person. Therefore I opted for comfort over style with my normcore outfit of chinos (with in built elastic adjusters 👌), check shirt, and trainers. Can't work out whether the look is more Woody Allen or the Only Me dad.

Despite the heat, I returned to the house to pick up a fleece 'just in case'.

Once on the train, it was a bit more relaxed. AC was on max which helped. Because the past few days have been pretty, pretty hot.

Heading into London reminded me of the difference a mini heatwave makes. Britain goes into a kind of weird fever dream. It feels like a different place - one that offers up the chance of a different way of being. People smile more, there's a sense that there's more to life than work, and everything looks a bit more exotic. The shittiest street corner can be transformed into a bit of the Med or the Caribbean with a coupla chairs to sit and take in the passing tapestry of life.

We can never get it quite right though. A few days is usually enough before the fever breaks, and usually some shop windows and bus shelters too. It's the heat. And the booze. 

Those few days are priceless though. I remember one hot summer in my teens when my football team played some early evening games in the fading heat of the day. 

We usually played on battered, muddy pitches on wet and cold Sundays. For these games we were upgraded to the flatter, less battered pitches, baked to a dusty hardness by a few weeks of good weather.

Some of the local girls came to see us and cheer us on - I felt like a legend even though we were notoriously crap. It's one of my abiding memories of that age.

Did we win? I can't remember, but I felt like a winner.

Everything feels different in the sun.

Mush alert!

It's nice to have a day where the focus is on you as a dad but for me every day is a father's day.

I've always loved being a dad and it doesn't seem to diminish as the kids get older. Sure, they were a lot more obviously cute when they were little as opposed to the hulking great teenage eating machines they are now. However, they continue to delight in different ways.

They're smart, funny, annoying, intriguing, and endlessly fascinating to me. Now they've reached a certain age, I'm sure that I'm about as interesting to them as an ancient tortoise, so I'm grateful for their forbearance.

Anyway, thanks for the gifts lads. They are appreciated but entirely unnecessary. Just keep being you.

Savour every sandwich

I never really notice memorial benches but this one stood out. It was a rather lovely crafted example made of naturalistic blonde planks of wood that retained a suggestion of the shape of the tree they came from. It was also situated beautifully on a village green overlooking a lovely stretch of river.

The name was quite an old one, 'Sidney', so I initially assumed an elderly person. But as I stared, the dates didn't seem right. Sidney had lived for only nine days.

Later that day I encountered a very different memorial. It was an old tractor wheel propped up on the edge of a slightly bleak field opposite an area of concrete hard standing. A piece of wood had been shaped into the silhouette of a pig and carried the name of a nearby farm. A second plaque gave the names of a 'dad and lad' that it called 'two country boys'.

It was the morning that news broke of the discovery of Michael Moseley's body. The TV doctor, famous for encouraging a slightly pick and mix approach to healthy living, was found on a Greek island where he was holidaying. His disappearance, and death, has caught the public imagination in a big way.

Partly this is because we are now so health aware and proactive on this front. In a way, it is rather like the modern approach to spirituality favoured by some - selecting what they like and creating a bespoke set of rituals and beliefs that can feel like a modern form of superstition.

Health is like this too. We all have ideas about what and when we eat, how to lose weight, how our mental health affects the physical, how we can live longer and better...

At the extreme it manifests in tech bros changing their blood, taking hundreds of daily supplements, and exercising more than they sleep, in the hope of living until... forever maybe?

For the rest of us, there is a smorgasbord of tricks and hacks we hope can game us a bit more time, or a better quality of life. For us, people like Michael Moseley are the high priests of healthfulness. His death has hit hard because it underlines the ultimate futility of trying to cheat the grim reaper.

I'm no different. Yesterday, I was on a bike ride - part of my latest stop-start journey to better health. I have my own set of health superstitions based on nothing more than trial and error, observation, and supposition. I don't know if they work, but sometimes I think they do. It's a work in progress and one that we're encouraged to do given modern expectations of health and wellbeing. I can't even explain to my doctor what ails me. They treat me at the edges and will hopefully be there if anything critical happens, to cure or alleviate.

The rest is slightly up to me it seems.

It may sound like yesterday's ride was a morbid affair but it was anything but - it was lovely to get out and experience our lovely countryside. One point of memento mori is to remind the living to live and to enjoy life.

Hence the Warren Zevon quote in the title. He was on the Letterman show with only a little time left as he had terminal cancer. What should have been a terrible, sombre occasion is actually very funny and uplifting as he wisecracks through his last appearance. He sums up his thoughts on life with those pithy three words.

Enjoy every sandwich, and enjoy every ride. For glass half empty types like me, it's perfect bumper sticker philosophy.