Friday, March 11, 2011

good, considering

Last night, I made my way up north in search of the flat of a friend who had left London only hours earlier. We had been colleagues for the last four years, my desk next to his and my bench just opposite his ever since my arrival at Imperial. Now he and his little family were moving back to the country they call home, closing the doors on an eight-year stretch of their lives.

On the night of their departure, literally minutes before a minicab was about to pick them up and take them to Heathrow, my friend had called me in the lab to ask if I wanted to take his PowerBook G4. Not being up to speed with ancient Apple hardware, I had no clear idea of what he was talking about, but I said yes anyway. Another toy maybe, or an addition to my growing collection of vintage notebooks.

With an Evening Standard in my hand and a podcast in my ear, I made my way up the Northern line, clear instructions hastily scribbled onto a scrap of paper. I was to get off at Highgate and walk east into the unknown, but I traveled in a dreamworld of my own acoustic and visual stimuli and only realized when I had exited through the ticket gates that I was in Archway, not Highgate.

To me, there's no difference. I had never been up there and couldn't tell one from the other, Karl Marx's grave notwithstanding. But I had to get to my friend's flat. Refusing to spend another quid and a half for one tube stop, I started walking along the main road, passing by some rather derelict stretches but never unsure of my way. Thank goodness for clear area maps in virtually every bus shelter in town. Twenty minutes later I was where I should have been just about twenty minutes earlier.

I turned right and dove into a deeply residential neighborhood of considerable appeal. There were some houses that wouldn't be out of place in continental Europe and big-windowed and modernist apartment buildings. It was very quiet. It was also very dark, and on a side street a block from my friend's former flat, I stepped into a inconspicuous hole and twisted my ankle with a violence that brought me to my knees.

Twisting my ankle is nothing new to me. In college I once crossed a pedestrian bridge in wild pursuit of bus letting off passengers underneath. I made the bus, but only after slipping off the last three or four steps of the bridge. For the next ten minutes on the bus, the pain in my ankle receded and every time I thought the pain was gone, it receded more, like some inverse monopedal orgasm. It was the strangest feeling.

A sprained ankle was the reason for my retiring from leisurely indoor football a good eight months ago. With the London marathon coming up, I didn't want to risk another injury that would keep me off the streets and off-course for another sub-three-hour finish. The season had started rather well. In January and February, I had run more than in the preceding years and built up a good form. The first benchmark of the year, the Roding Valley half marathon, had gone quite well – surprisingly well even, considering how slow I had felt running it. The next test was supposed to be the Finchley 20-mile race this weekend.

As I sat on a sidewalk in Crouch End, whimpering into the night, the irony of the injury was hard to take. I hadn't taken any risks, but my ankle had already swollen to a degree to purge any thoughts of running from my brain, not only for this weekend, but also for the foreseeable future. The marathon seemed out of the question. I didn't even feel like walking. And yet I had to continue my strange journey, picking up a tiny silver notebook from a neighbor and hobbling back to the tube station, no eyes for architecture this time.


This morning, I slowly woke to the relentless buzz of my alarm. I had slept well; there was no pain throbbing through my ankle. It was still swollen and it hurt when I got up and put weight on it, but it felt much better than it had the night before, and infinitely better than after that fateful football game eight months ago. There is no way I'm going to run Finchley, but maybe London isn't out of the question after all.

I turned the radio on in time for the seven-o'clock news. The devastating earthquake in Japan was all there was; the tsunami had just rolled in, flattening the land and washing everything in its path away. The catastrophe was far, half a world away, but for me it struck home. The friend who had left London last night was flying back to Japan, scheduled to arrive shortly after the earthquake had struck.

My friend is ok. He sent me an email earlier today, telling me how they had learned of the earthquake while on their final descent into Narita, how they had circled uncertainly for an hour and then been diverted to another airport where they could land safely. Their nightmare wasn't over – they weren't allowed to leave the cabin for another six hours, turning their flight into an epic 20-hour ordeal – but he and his family are doing all right. Things are good, considering the situation.


Japanese 12-inch PowerBook G4

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