More than one person ran last weekend’s London marathon carrying a refrigerator. To be clear, that’s one refrigerator per runner, not a shared one. Admittedly, these weren’t the six-foot-tall kind that loom over a kitchen. They were the kind that fit under the counter and mind their own business, that are shorter than your average human, and that can, if you’re crazy enough, be strapped to your back and carried for long distances, although most people don’t care to do that.
Laura Bird is one of the people who cared to, and she’s probably the one I heard on the radio. “You have to follow your dreams,” she said. Or if it wasn’t her, it was some other woman who ran the marathon carrying a refrigerator. I was driving and didn’t take notes.
Whoever she was, she left me wondering whether as a culture we haven’t taken this follow-your-dreams stuff too far. I dreamed about scraping the side of my car on a rock the other night. Some dreams can just stay dreams. It’s okay.
Irrelevant photo: Honesty–which is, honestly, the name of the flower.
Daniel Fairbrother, another fridge carrying runner, stole the limelight, though, by stopping partway through the race to get down on one knee and propose to his girlfriend. With the fridge still on his back. He also made headlines during a training run, when he was stopped by the police, who thought he might have been an ambitious shoplifter.
“You do know . . . they’ll deliver it for you.” the cop said once he was convinced that he was just dealing with some innocent maniac.
I don’t know if this is strictly a British thing. Lord Google informs me that someone’s keeping track of the fastest time for completing a marathon while carrying a household appliance, which does argue for it being more than a personal quirk but tells us nothing about what country or countries can claim the quirk. So if you know whether people are carrying refrigerators in in other countries’ marathons, leave me a comment, will you? I need to know this.
And while we’re at it, I’d love to hear about whether it’s strictly a British thing to run races dressed as–oh, I don’t know, bananas or phone booths or ballerinas. Because people do that here too.
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If carrying a refrigerator isn’t one of the dreams you want to follow, you could consider marathon wine tasting. Tom Gilbey tasted a glass of wine at every mile along the route, trying to name the vintage, the grape, and the producer. He got 4 wrong and 21 “mostly” right. He kept from getting pie-eyed, he said, by taking only small sips or spitting the wine out if it wasn’t good, but in the photo the BBC ran he looks a little the worse for wear and the BBC says his verdicts became hazier as he got closer to the finish line.
At one point in the race, he said, “There was a real trio of bad ‘uns, and then around a similar point I was overtaken by a fridge. So that was sad.”
He did raise money for charity, but it was also, ever so incidentally, great publicity for his, ahem, “wine event experience” business.
As long as we’re talking about household appliances
I’m endlessly fascinated by the obscenities of an unequal society. This one comes from Harrods–a store that’s not known for its bargains–which is offering an “ironing system” for under £4,000. Exactly $1 under, because any marketer knows £3,999 looks like a lot less than £4,000.
I need to add a link here to prove I’m not hallucinating.
How is an ironing system different from an iron and an ironing board? Well, it has a cover–that’s important–and a water tank and wheels and a cable rewinder and a bunch of verbiage that may or may not mean anything. I’m not the best person to judge. Ironing’s against my religion.
What do you do with an almost-£4,000 ironing system? Why, you iron your clothes, that’s what. And your sheets and underwear and socks. And your dishrags. I suspect the system has too many pieces to carry in a race, although the wheels might tempt a creative sort to roll it.
Outdated literary gossip
Let’s change gears. There’s nothing like a literary trash fight to get the blood circulating, even when it’s old news.
Very old news. Back in the 1920s, when John Betjeman (later a poet laureate) was a student of C.S. Lewis’s (best known for writing The Chronicles of Narnia), Betjeman annoyed Lewis enough that he he wrote in his diary, “I wish I could get rid of this idle prig.” But he didn’t keep his dislike to himself: he refused to support Betjeman’s bid for an honors degree.
Years later, the preface to one of Betjeman poetry collections thanks “Mr CS Lewis for the fact on page 256.”
The book has 45 pages.
And the news from abroad is . . .
In the US, ice cream sales increased by 3.1 percent in areas that had recently made recreational marijuana legal. Cookie sales increased by 4.1 percent, and chip [that would be potato chip] sales increased by 5.3 percent.
I can’t give you a link for that. It comes from Britannica’s “One Good Fact”–a daily email featuring random bits of useless information. My life is immeasurably richer for having received this one.
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Someone in Iceland is working to run a glacier for president. It seems to meet the requirements: it’s more than 35 years old and–well, you could at least argue that it’s a citizen. It needs a civil registration number, though, so the originator of the idea, Angela Rawlings, took its name–Snaefellsjokulll–as her middle name so she can be a proxy for the glacier on the ballot.
If you have a spare umlaut, drop it in there somewhere, would you? I’ve run out, it’s late, and the shop’s closed.
A team of people is now working on the campaign, and like the fridge runners, who run to raise money for charities, they’re up to something serious.
“I come from the indigenous lands of Siberia,” Rawlings said, “and there the personhood of nature is something that is so common to the culture and the psyche in general.” The glacier is melting and she hopes its candidacy will put climate change at the center of the election.
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In Barcelona, residents are fed up with tourists.
Okay, lots of places are fed up with tourists. They price locals out of housing, they travel in hordes, and most of them are convinced that them having a good time is more important than someone else having an everyday life. Not long after they hit critical mass, all the old shops are replaced by bars and nightclubs and vomitoria and by places selling key chains and ice cream cones and overpriced food. In Barcelona, so many tourists were taking the number 116 bus that residents complained they couldn’t get home.
Why that bus? It goes by Antoni Gaudi’s Park Guell (that needs an umlaut too; thanks), which is on the tourist must-see list.
Now the city council has had the bus taken off of Apple and Google maps, and that’s made it invisible–except to residents.
Local activist Cesar Sanchez (add an accent please; the accent shop has been replaced by one renting wetsuits to tourists) said, “We laughed at the idea at first, but we’re amazed that the measure has been so effective.”
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After last week’s post about the National Health Service, a friend sent me a link to FullFact‘s look at Rishi Sunak’s pledge to reduce NHS waiting times.
How’d he do? “Despite the ambiguity in the pledge, NHS waiting lists in England, for planned treatment, increased throughout the year following Sunak’s pledge.” Ditto waiting lists for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
The NHS has other kinds of waiting lists, including ones called hidden waiting lists–sorry, no data get published for those–but the list for planned treatment is the one politicians usually mean.
Did they grow because those dastardly NHS employees were on strike so much? Well, yes, but that added to the numbers, but they’d have grown anyway, even if the government had settled with them up front.
Notes from the U.K. 