I walked to work from Holland Park this morning as part of my new 'don't sit on the bus and fret uselessly about your mistakes' regime. So instead of sitting on the top deck chewing over them, uselessly, like a toothless crone with a toffee (which come to think of it, would be more of a sucking the misery metaphor) I marched through Notting Hill Gate and into Kensington Gardens and fretted uselessly while walking.
Well it made a change.
Worrying has a different quality when you walk than it does when you're immobilised beside the Pinky and Perky sounds of other people's iPods. You are still visited by regret but somehow it doesn't settle in and take root, or curl round your guts and squeeze in the same way as it does when you're stuck in traffic. Rather it flits around them like a socialite at a party. You replay all your mistakes with the sour benefit of hindsight but your finger is always on the pause button able to skip the sadness forward, frame by frame. If only there was a rewind and you could get a different outcome, or better still a delete.
I tried to concentrate on the early morning joggers instead of cringing over recent trailers for my series of unfortunate events, but with limited success. They all look a darn sight more miserable than me. What happened to the supposed endorphins? And it's so ungainly... You have the arm slappers who look like they have St Vitus Dance; the little mermaids who put their feet down so gingerly it's as though every step is agony; the trudgers who seem to be running through quicksand; the trotters, the panters, the pack carriers, those swaddled in jumpers and sleeveless puffa jacket so that they can hardly move at all and, unfortunately, the semi-naked who move a little bit too much, too visibly. There are also an awful lot of women who haven't heard of sports' bras and whose bosoms bounce around like toddlers on a sugar rush. I can see this is added value to the health giving properties of exercise from the men's point of view given that one of the stumblers actually stopped and watched a red faced, lumpen girl skip while her female personal trainer, flat-chested and clingfilmed into thermal spandex, stood by with that blank-eyed look that women get when when they're watching their toddlers bounce around on a sugar rush. Or was that just my particular brand of mothering?
I just wanted to run (yes actually - me - run) up to the poor woman and scream 'Strap Them Down'. They'll be at your knees by the time you're thirty. But I didn't. I just walked briskly and sedately past the poor, flushed pudding with her boobs wobbling crazily and cross-eyed around on her chest as the sun came up like a big blob of Fanta on the misty horizon, and went back to my reverie.
Then a woman came towards me wearing red ear muffs and grinned at me conspiratorily. I wondered why. Do I look like I have kindship with the ear-muff wearing sorority? And then I realised it was because she was knee deep in the confetti of leaves, childishly kicking them around her heels as she ploughed through the piles. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
Well it certainly seemed to have cheered her up, so I thought I'd give it a try myself. In I went in the ballet slippers. The best thing that came out of the recently curtailed relationship with the short, nay Lilliputian, man (our so called mini-break was aptly named - after three days together we had bored each other into catatonia. And I don't mean the defunct band.) was that I now have a whole wardrobe of flat footwear that is actually comfortable. So things to be happy about No 1 - now that we've faced the lack of music I can - hurrah, finally wear heels again. He used to say he quite fancied the whole Dudley Moore thing, but he was so dainty I feared I would look like I was taking my son out for tea on a school exeat.
Crunch, crunch, crunch (but me this time).
Actually, I didn't feel cheery I just felt silly. Sheepishly, I stopped crunching and came out onto the path again, with little flecks of leaves clinging to my tights so that it looked as though I had some sort of seasonal psoraisis. A man nearby was leaning on the signposted map of the park with his head in his arms in a gesture of despair. 'Oh come on laddie, it's not that bad,' I thought, wondering if I should go and see if he was okay. And then I realised. He was only stretching.
