As with most holidays, for many people Christmas 2013 was most likely stuffed full of moments – whether they were as dramatic as the floods in the South of England or as simple as elderly relatives conking out after a bit too much bubbly.
I encountered the defining moment of my personal Christmas 2013 on my Boxing Day run. I’m not going to lie, it was a run fuelled by guilt. On Christmas Day, I had indulged in the traditional festive blowout. I had eaten so much that I felt like a hippo. No, an elephant. No, I’ll throw it in there, a blue whale – a blue whale that had been swept from the ocean on a tide of roast potatoes and cranberry stuffing and was consequently beached on the sofa, slowly collapsing under its own body weight. I needed to get back into the water, so I went for a run.
I was about fifteen minutes into said run when I ran past a woman who was walking through the park with a man, who I assumed to be her husband. In her arms was a live turkey. It was so strange, so surreal, that I was forced to stop in order to get a better look.
“Do you like him?” the woman said. “He’s gorgeous, isn’t he?”
Gorgeous wasn’t a word that I thought applied to the turkey, whose disturbingly reptilian head stuck out like a periscope from the mass of feathers that constituted its body.
Perhaps missing the slightly sceptical look on my face, the woman continued, “Thought we’d take him for a walk, you know, sample the air.”
I had a mental list of things that I thought I probably wouldn’t see in my lifetime. Things such as the Northern Lights or the Earth from outer space. A woman walking a turkey would have also made the list, if such a bizarre thing had ever crossed my mind. I asked the woman for what reason, exactly, was she ‘walking’ the turkey. It turned out that she had bought it with the intention of killing it on Christmas Eve. It was part of the ‘authentic Christmas experience’, she said. (I wasn’t aware that such a thing existed). However, when the dreaded hour had come, neither she nor her husband had been able to carry out the deed.
“It was looking at me with these sad, sad eyes. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it,” the woman said.
“I was looking at its bum,” her husband added, solemnly. “And I thought, I can’t stuff that. So we went and bought a Tesco chicken instead.”
I didn’t exactly agree with or, in fact, understand the man’s logic, but found the overall incident amusing. It got me thinking about all the interesting things I had encountered on my runs (probably more appropriate use the term jogs) over the past year and a half. I had been running on and off since I was fifteen but I had only consistently started since I enrolled at university – partially because I wanted to feel fresh and fit, partly due to my increased consumption of calorific alcoholic beverages. By running, I was able to drink (and eat) more without suffering with what I like to call ‘expanding waistline syndrome’. This, I have found, is one of the best things about running.
Another great thing about running is that it can be a source of entertainment- all you have to do is look for it. It gets you out and about in a world where all sorts of interesting and amusing things happen. I often like to be observant when running, mainly to distract myself from the sheer agony of the lactic building in my legs and the air burning in my lungs.
So I have decided to start a ‘Jog Blog’ about all of the interesting things I see while running. Who knows what my next run will stir up! Hopefully no more death-defying birds.
All of the Interesting Things I See When Running 