The bluffers guide to a half marathon.

Decide to do the race at the last minute, make sure you haven't planned or trained towards it at all.

Make sure you have never run the distance. In fact keep any running you do under 5kms.

Two days before the race eat and drink as much as possible. I recommend the Dom Perignon 1999. Exceptional. Wash this down with at least 5 pints of heineken. Not necessarily in that order.

Get a rotten nights sleep.

Get to where you are going, register, then go out and buy some gear (socks, shorts etc.)

On the night before the race, eat as much as possible. To aid digestion of the Goats cheese, scallops, pannacotta and 1/2 bottle of pouilly fume, I recommend a peppermint tea to aid digestion. Drink a lucosade sport before bed.

Get a rotten nights sleep.

Get up, have a Lucosade Sport, two poached eggs, two sausages, some brown bread, toast and two cups of coffee.

Pee. A lot.

Tog out and run the marathon. Make sure that you have vaselined your balls and nipples throughly.

Feel a sense of elation and satisfaction at having run a 1/2 Marathon.

Eat a banana and some snickers. Go and eat a throughly repulsive lunch. Have a pint of Guinness.

Begin to feel pain, drink some more lucozade sport. Eat a three course meal, Drink a bottle of wine (Bordeaux, if possible). End the night with a gin and tonic.

Wake up. Really feel extreme pain. Have breakfast (full irish). Have a bath. Go home, go to bed.

Wake up. Feel less pain. Go to work. Go for a swim. Go to bed.

...TBC...

A bleak sestina about work

Haven't been blogging for a while, but here is a sestina. A highly stylised form of 12th century poetry. Not only am I blogging again, but a poem as well! Feel free to send me a sestina and I'll post it. I have foregone Iambic pentameter, because it's hard and I'm lazy.

Going to Work?

Today I arrived at the train station
And cursed the right-handed ticket machine
One of life's less subtle jokes
A sinister cross to bear
I can't allow a feeling of persecution
Because that way leads madness

Maybe I should give way to madness?
Reject my place in life's station
Embrace a state of persecution
Should you be talking to me, Machine?
I find it hard to bear
Your overly technical jokes.

Kidnap victims make jokes
To keep out the madness
Like a sanity Teddy Bear
I have found my station
In front of my tired machine
My own lesser persecution

It's a phantom persecution
Like bad Scooby-Doo jokes
010000010110110100100000010010010010000001100001 Machine?
Roll on, roll on everyday madness
Last stop crazy station
I ate your porridge, bear.

Little dipper you are a bear
Free from any earthly persecution
Shining in your heavenly station
The butt of big dipper's jokes
Do you reflect my madness
Stuck in my corporeal machine?

Being used like a machine
Is a situation I can bear
It leads to a bland madness
With little or no persecution
No more bad jokes
Numbly, I accept my station

Do I station myself to act like a machine?
Relating to life like bad jokes that I cannot bear.
Do I prefer boredom to persecution and madness?