Day 26, 2 Feb: On Track

Norfolk Terrace, Day 26. On Track

 There has been something I’ve forgotten to mention in my days living here: surrounded by friends who have an instinct to cook dinner almost every night, I’ve picked up the habit—not to say I’ll be making roast beef at home every night for family or Labyrinthians or Katya, but I am a little more confident in my cooking abilities. I’ve decided to include photos. The one on the bottom left is my first attempt at making a chicken-potato curry with basmati rice (I did not make the curry sauce from scratch, though). Jenny decided to appear in my picture, and she definitely kept me company, along with Alvin, Dan, Stephen, Vinnie, and others. I asked things every now and then, some basic questions maybe…but did it all.  The one directly right is tonight’s chicken linguini with sliced tomatoes and cheese. This one was a lot easier. Oh, and I added one of Stephen handing his phone to Steff, who is behind Jenny/Garlic Jen. Dan the Man is in the back.

After the curry, I let the spatula-esque kitchen utensil rest on the still hot pan while I ate…this was my horror at what happened.

                                                                             

Moving onto the day proper, I enjoyed both my Nineteenth Century Writing seminar and Romanticism lecture. While I grew impatient that my seminar leader focused so intensely on one passage in Emma for a half-hour, I suddenly began to appreciate the unrushed analysis, the intricacies of narrative voice, and the difference of meaning in Emma’s explicit thoughts and subtle, self-controlled speech to Mr Elton [see the lack of a period after “Mr”? In England, it appears to be grammatically correct without the period. I know, it’s odd.]. I relaxed a bit on my pace of analyzing, stressed a little less.

As for Romanticism, the lecturer Tim, a white-haired, bespectacled gentleman, had the most reverential treatment of topic transitions I have ever witnessed. After analyzing a poem from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he’d pause and say, “We’ll leave this poem now”. His last comment intrigued me as well: “Let’s go over briefly Blake’s ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ [the Songs of Experience one] and then I shall leave you in peace.” His voice was soft, yet sharp when a thought drove him. His whole approach to the lecture was “putting these poems in a social and cultural narrative”, which he testified to the difficulties of such a venture yet nevertheless attempted it quite well. The age of William Blake witnessed the social injustice in child labor, in rigorous religious radicalism, and the just surfacing precept of the rights of man [and of children to play, as Blake would have asserted]. He even published Songs of Innocence in 1789, the same year that the French Revolution began. This was not coincidence.

I joined Stef in the library a little later to study Blake, and then nervously got dressed for running to the track. After making a fool of myself in front of the receptionist, I was let in and found the track easy enough. I found it easy enough to meet an Athletic club member, Richard, and was soon brought into a 10-person warm-up. Then Tim, as I soon was to call him (a coach for the Norwich Athletic Society), told four of us (the non-race runners) that we’d be doing—okay, bear with me, this might be difficult to explain—two 10-minute non-stop 2-person 400 m relays. So, each person, let’s start with Richard, would be doing a 200 m run with the baton, pass it on to me, and he’d run across the track’s diameter (the grassy field area that the track encircles) and then receive the baton and I’d run back the diameter and so on. Well, let’s just say that Tim did not anticipate that I could run. Like, “as fit as a fiddle,” as they say here. After the first 10 minutes, he just stood in front of me and asked how long I had been running. I said 6 years, but through the panting, I only made the second part of my speech audible: “I’m on a social running club back home”. He was impressed. After the second 10-minute, he approached one of the fastest club runners, Nick, and was “singing praises about me”. Once I found that Nick did 15-minute 5k’s, though, I kinda let him know that I was more inclined to long distance. He still went over the nature of the training and the big event this May, which blew my world:

The British Universities & Colleges Sport (BUCS) Championships will be held in the Olympic Stadium. The competition is fierce, though, and after the initial dreams of glory, I reasoned that I’d have to sacrifice probably more time than I was probably willing while studying abroad, not to mention weekends and spring break when I’d rather be traveling. The main reason I was dissuaded, though, was the very fact that it’s track. I’m a cross country man, true and true: 4 semesters of cross country in high school and 1 of track. Currently, I train for half-marathons (don’t know when my third will be), not 10K foot races. There was a definite reason: cross country is exploration and meditative tests of exertion in the wilderness and rugged terrain. Track is tense footwork endlessly running in oblong circles.

Last thing of the day: Vinnie, my roommate, was willing to have his picture taken on the spur of the moment, and so here he is, in the doorway between our rooms.