I'll never run another marathon...

...which means my unfinished business will remain just that - except when it comes to writing...

London, 2010. My left knee was already hurting during the warm-up. In fact it had been giving me trouble during the previous few weeks of training. But I did what all idiots do: run through the pain, tell myself it would go away, ‘be brave’.

The first half of the race went okay. I found a way of running which minimised the discomfort, and allowed myself to be distracted by the crowds and the fancy-dress runners: a Hulk Hogan lookalike just wearing trainers, his number, and too-small yellow budgie-smugglers; the man dressed as a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale; and Darth Vader. I got so tired of people in the crowd shouting “may the force be with you” that I had to accelerate away from him.

I was feeling good when I hit Tower Bridge after 2 hours, bang on schedule - but around 15 miles came the agony. Every mile or so I passed medical stations with beckoning empty wheelchairs and thought of stopping. Along the Embankment my knee almost gave way and I nearly collapsed into the gutter. But I kept going: brave or stupid, you tell me.

And I finished.

Within a year or so I had my knee operated on. I swore “I’ll be back!” - there was unfinished business, me and the London marathon.

Except now I won’t. Given recent health issues, it would be foolish to try. And probably fatal. So, something not to cross off the bucket list…

This is an imaginary list about which I’ve started to worry. Proximity - and time’s narrowing window - puts it into sharper focus. Mainly my list seems to be about going back to places: Lucca, Basle, Barcelona, Singapore, Australia. We’re talking about the first two next year, maybe. But the rest..?

And there are people on the list too; a different kind of unfinished business. Mainly this seems to be about reconnecting, or saying ‘thank you’, or apologising. (There are far too many in the latter category…)

I take a bizarre kind of comfort in the fact that there’s nothing ‘traditional’ on my list, like taking a sky dive, bungee jumping, or going on a cruise.

Writing’s a different matter of course. Writing represents a totally and profoundly inexhaustible bucket list, a catalogue of all those things that will never be written - or those previously started but never to be picked up again and finished!

But it’s more than that. Being open to acknowledging as much, drags along with it all those peripheral things that are also unlikely to get ‘ticked off’: I write really quite decent novels but too few people read them and I’m unlikely to ever make it to a Waterstones’ table (their loss, I tell myself); the play that for years I’ve been promising myself I’ll write, will most likely never see the light of day; I’ll never make it to the stage as a speaker at the Hay-on-Wye book festival etc.

It might be a different story were I thirty years younger. No; it would be a different story.

There’s a nagging voice which always chirps up at this point and tells me that I could settle for what I have, rest on my laurels (pitiful or otherwise). But ‘settling’ is not only the wrong word, it is totally defeatist. You might just as well open the bottle of pills now.

Writing should never be about ‘settling’ - it should always be about striving: make that next poem better than the last; polish that short story so that it has a real chance of doing well in a competition; take that idea you had and create the most wonderful character who leaps from the page…

You get the picture.

Nor is writing any kind of list; it’s more like an encyclopaedia. There is always - always - something new to write about. Indeed, you might even choose to combine it with your bucket list: not going to make it back to Australia? Write about it then! Never going to get the chance to say ‘sorry’ in person? Do so in a story.

Perhaps that’s the key, recognising that writing never represents unfinished business but always - and most wonderfully - ‘unfinishable’ business. It’s an infinite world of possibilities.

I may never run another marathon, but that doesn’t mean I’m done yet!

---