I wanted to write a blog about dreams coming true - how I conquered the sub-three-hour marathon. But as I sit here, barely two hours after crossing the line, that isn’t a story I can tell. I ran Frankfurt in 3:04.35 officially (3.03 without the loo break!). I’ve probably run more than a dozen marathons in my life, and my expectations tend to outstrip either my ability or my execution. The gap between what I hoped for and what I achieve can be a difficult place to sit. Today was no different. I wanted sub-three. I didn’t get it. My two great friends, Phil and Jon both achieved their goals. Phil ran 2:59:58 (incredible). Jon ran like a pro for 3:03. They set out their goals and nailed it. Does coming up short reveal some fundamental weakness? Does failure tell us something deterministic about ourselves, some immutable truth about our character? We want the things we achieve to tell us that we’re good enough. But the marathon is a dangerous peg on whic...
This week, I proudly saw my son performing at the Oxford Playhouse in a newly updated English translation of Chekhov’s The Seagull . I’ve never read Chekhov, so my son’s (quite brillaint) acting is proving an education. Good theatre is timeless because it tells us something about humanity that we have a proclivity to forget, avoid or hide from. When The Seagull premiered in 1896, it was a disaster. Audiences disparaged its unconventional form, with its emphasis on subtext and insinuation over literalism. What is clear is that every character in the play is unhappy. It’s a series of portraits of the different ways we struggle emotionally. There is the grinding misery of poverty and physical hardship, which attracts zero sympathy (unromantic psychological pain). The neurotic is consumed by what might go wrong; the narcissist by the inconvenient truth that other people have lives of their own; the melancholic remains blighted by sadness despite success. Misery takes the form of ...