The Subtle Art of Running in Small Circles

 

We’ve been in the Falklands for 26 days now, and we are still very much here.

 

Onward travel to Antarctica has been delayed due to the runway conditions down on station. We have no choice but to wait for the 6cm layer of consolidated ice to melt out. There’s a sense of irony in the fact that, on this occasion, it’s the ice which isn’t melting that is causing us the problems. We must remain in group/bubble quarantine, but at least we have had a change of scene – we moved out of the hotel a week ago. The ten of us (known as Dash 3) have been split across three houses in Stanley. I’m at 9 McKay Close with Dee and Poppy. The outside space/garden is bigger than the exercise yard at the hotel – we can now run a continuous 100-meter loop. We can also go outside whenever we like, there is no rota, and there is a trampoline. It is a self-catered house, so we get food ordered in and cook for ourselves. Life has the feel of being a little more normal here. Sure enough though we still get looks from the neighbours and passers-by when they see us running and walking in endless circles around the garden. The looks always seem to be somewhere between pity and amusement. They always wave though, and that cheers us up. Everyone waves here – in part because they seem to be friendly folk, and because with an island population of around 3,000 there’s a fair chance you’re going to know the person. It’s a warmth that reminds me of being out and about in Cumbria. We are hoping that the owners of the house don’t mind too much that we have created a new feature – a perimeter garden path. Even after the first 5km run, after 50 laps of the garden, we had made a noticeable dent in the mossy grass. It seems that over the past couple of years I have had to learn to perfect the subtle art of running in small circles. Some of them have been very small indeed. I have now spent 45 days in quarantine in the Falkland Islands, and then there was the 5-week journey home by sea earlier this year. That’s a lot of laps of gardens, exercise yards, and ships. It’s good head space, but it’s not good thinking space. Perhaps that’s the reason why I’m so compelled to push through the monotony of it – because it’s a time to switch our brains off amidst so much time where it’s easy to overthink. I’ll listen to music, I’ll focus on the movement, focus on each step, and count the laps. I usually change direction after every kilometre. If I chose to walk instead of run, then I’ll listen to a podcast. I downloaded a whole selection before leaving the UK. Perhaps my favourite is a podcast called ‘Never Strays Far’ (in all its different guises) by Ned Boulting and David Millar. It follows the world of professional cycling, the Grand Tours, the Classics, the Worlds, etc. You get to hear what the weather is doing in Spain, you get the latest traffic updates from Brittany, and what the hotels are like across Italy. You get to hear about Ned’s dreams, and David’s interpretation of them, and every now and then you’ll even get to find out what has been going on in the bike race. I like the tangents, the segues, I like the observations and details from a world which is currently so different from my own. All those things seem utterly fascinating to me when I’m quarantine, when I’m down on station, when I’m on a ship for days on end. It’s a reminder, and a perspective of a life beyond your own. It’s easy to get caught up in wherever you are, and it’s easy to stop looking - not just outwards but also beyond. In fact, it feels like I’ve reached a point here where it seems easier to stay rather than to go on. It’s hard to imagine life existing in any other way. We were talking about this the other day – that it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility, certainly not beyond the realms of imagination, that we might just get forgotten about here. We would carry on much the same, just waiting for updates, and it would only be months later, even years after the travel corridor had opened again, that they remember we are still here. We joked that it would be some big news story, on the same sort of scale and interest as when they discover a human who has been raised by wolves.

While I do miss having more and varied social interactions, while I do miss riding my bike or putting on my running shoes and just taking off somewhere, I wouldn’t say that I’ve been bored. I am quite happy in my own company, happy losing myself in a book, or in a drawing. We’ve also found other ways of keeping ourselves amused. Once we had completed the 14 days self-isolation quarantine at the hotel, we were then able to spend our outside time together as a group of ten. I’d brought a football down with me, which on the slanted, tussocky exercise yard made us all look utterly useless. I’d liked to have seen how Messi would have coped with it – it was worse than a cold, wet night in Stoke. I think there were very few of us, perhaps even just one of us, who would even dare to venture to describe ourselves as a footballer. Catrin, for example, while not lacking in enthusiasm, could frequently be heard saying, “I just can’t work out which leg I should use to kick it with.” It’s something of a miracle that we never lost the ball, broke a window (sorry Hannah, Sam, and Pete), or broke ourselves – although competitive crab football came pretty close. Meanwhile I was there still holding onto the wild dream that someone would walk past and scout me for the Falkland Islands’ international football team. I was fairly certain that I’d been in the country quite long enough to qualify. Hopes and dreams are interesting things, and they come in different forms. For some, hope is bad for they hope but never do, or never say, and so their lives are wished away. Others pin too much on it, they may even build their world on it, but what then when it comes crashing down, and all they are left with is disappointment. For others still, it may be entwined so closely with their breathing you couldn’t say which of the two was keeping them alive. And a hope like this, a hope so enduring, it may do as well to call it love - for what else is there in this world that could never falter? And then there’s the hope, where hope is a luxury, when nothing too much depends on it, but a great joy is found in the belief that just about anything might be possible and you go around with a smile of wonder fixed upon your face.