Half-Marathon

The world has no center, at least on its surface.  But Greenwich, which we’ll soon be having to leave, does sometimes seem like the center, even apart from its distinction of being the origin for the zero meridian of longitude.  We happen to be at the center of Greenwich.  Immediately after we arrived here, the London Marathon came past our windows, starting up the hill by the Greenwich observatory and ending in the middle of London.  And this morning the London Half-Marathon, going in the opposite direction, started at London Bridge and ended outside our windows.

The previous day, the street was filled with monster vehicles unloading steel barriers, and this morning it was filled with the rustle of plastic being stuffed into the hundreds of spaces between the wires of these barriers, as if to convert them to silvery hedges.

I went down and learned that the silvery things were blankets, to be handed to the runners after they finished.  Space blankets, I think; I remember that about half a century ago I tried, to keep me warm while camping, a fabulous polyethylene blanket invented by NASA, ten times warmer and lighter than wool; found that it kept in not only heat but sweat, was like sleeping in tinfoil.  The runners’ blankets rustled like tinfoil too, but didn’t crinkle.

About ten o’clock the first of them came pounding past, to the finish line by the Cutty Sark.  Proceeding on around it and back past out house, they accepted, from the army of volunteers, their medals and blankets.

There was more to it than that.  The blanket-cloaked runners and segments of the population of onlookers went on in through the campus of buildings opposite to us (once Tudor palaces, now Greenwich University) and out into the park under the observatory, for an array of activities and sideshows too numerous to mention.

Except that this maze, made of portable blocks of box hedge, was deserted, and rather deservedly so: it consisted (the way I analyze mazes) of an easy through-path and only one sac (dead-end path), un-tempting because starting right beside the maze’s obvious exit.

And this huge marquee was waiting for a concert; the four steel hoops supporting it struck me as modern analogue to the cruck beam framework of the ancient house in Lyme Regis that we are having to sell.

When we came back to the center of Greenwich an hour later, brave runners were still streaming in.