The sun shone today.
It has been a splendid day, breathing the chill air of early spring.
I had put the washing machine on its timer setting last night, so when we got up this morning it had just finished. The day was already so bright and promising that I hung all of the washing outside on the line. By eight o’ clock it was fluttering satisfyingly in the breeze, giving me the extra happiness of being able to demonstrate my early-rising domestic virtue to the rest of the alley as they drove past on their way to work.
After my walk and the washing, and the morning jobs I went back to bed.
I hoped that none of the neighbours would notice this development, which was less ostentatiously admirable, although I think that they might have, because I was just getting up when one of the sheets blew itself loose, and I had to rush out into the garden in my dressing gown to retrieve it.
Number One Son-In-Law called after that, with further instructions for my continued fitness project. He thinks that I need to practice doing a Bleep Test by myself, so that when I get to it I will know how to time myself and to turn at the line without losing too much time.
I am not sure if I have explained the horrors of a Bleep Test before now: but in brief, two lines are drawn on the floor, one at either end of a gym. When the bleep sounds you have to run between the lines. Once at the other end you have to wait to set off until the next bleep. The bleeps get faster and faster. You have got to reach the line before the bleep goes or you are out. By the end the bleeps are dinging away merrily as you slog up and down between the lines, wheezing and gasping and begging for an end.
The bleep test can go on for ages, but I have only got to get up to something called 5.5, which Number One Daughter says is a comfortable jog, and I think is a soul-destroying impossibility.
I have been pondering the difficulty of trying it for some days now, and as luck would have it, yesterday I was coming through the park when I noticed a young man dashing up and down between two points on a flat bit of path. He had stuck a couple of sticks in the ground and was practising for his own bleep test.
We exchanged sympathetic noises for a few moments, and he said that he would leave his markers there for me so that if I wanted to try it myself I could use them.
This afternoon, since the sun was out and there was no ice anywhere, I thought I might give it a go.
When I got to the park his markers had gone, but this didn’t matter. I found some sticks in the hedge and paced out the fifteen metres that had to be between them, and gave it a go.
I was spectacularly, and monumentally rubbish.
To my surprise I was actually considerably worse than I had been the last time I took the test.
After a few minutes of attempting it, only slightly hindered by the interested dogs, I collapsed in a shattered heap of failure at the side of the path.
I had a break and tried again, with no more success at all.
I tried several times and got worse every time.
Finally I gave up and limped dejectedly back home.
I rang Number One Son-In-Law.
He was brightly upbeat and undefeated, and suggested kindly that my markings might not have been entirely accurate, and told me not to worry.
I did worry, though, and when Mark came home I told him all about it.
He got me to show him the metre I had been pacing, and then said that it was at least a metre and a quarter.
This meant that I had been trying to run twenty metres in the time allotted for fifteen.
I felt a bit better after that.
All the same, I have become very worried. The actual test day is next Monday, and I have got to be able to run for three and a half minutes up and down a gym, getting faster all the time. I can’t do this at the moment. I can’t do anything much at the moment. My muscles have all become aching planks of self-pitying rigidity.
I suppose I could consider finding a Russian and asking for some performance-enhancing drugs. The problem with this is that the only Russian I know is Son Of Oligarch at Oliver’s school, and I don’t expect that he will have any.
I will just have to keep trying.
Monday is ages away.
