This morning I ran just under three miles, bringing my Janathon total to a respectable seven miles. It was dark, but dry, and relatively warm. I followed a well-trod route for the first mile, east towards the Cuckmere, but on road. It is folly to go off-road in the dark. Then I tried to be clever and, running through street after street of bungalows, thought I could find a twitten, the Sussex dialect word for a passage, to take me through to the A259. However, these modern estates were built for car-drivers, not pedestrians. I suppose the planners thought twittens dreadfully old-fashioned.
I don't think too much about my gait when I run; perhaps I should. For me the ideal runner's gait was best demonstrated in the credits for a dreadful cartoon version of Tintin shown on the television in my boyhood. I was something of a Tintin scholar, both in translation and in the original ; if only there had been a question on Tintin in the Oxford entrance examinations of 1973, instead of boring old Jane Austen, my life might have been very different. The television cartoon was dire; I cannot believe Hergé had anything to do with it at all. The animation was crude, even by the standards of the day, whoever did the voices had no sympathy for the characters. They did not take the great middle period books for their subject, but one of the Latin American tales. However, the opening credits have stayed with me for they showed, to the accompaniment of a banal repetitive theme, some stereotypical South American Indians, wrapped up in heavy ponchos and big hats, walking across the screen from right to left. Their bodies were frozen, expect for their legs which carried them across the screen with an absurd circular motion, like a child's toy. Ludicrous as it was, it seemed to em to be the way running should be, automatic, rhythmic, ceaseless. I have been trying to emulate them ever since.
