marathon eve eve

Last night I slept with my feet elevated having noticed that my left ankle had the look of a cankle about it. My own fault I hope/suspect as I took little exercise on the longer, second leg of my flight. No pain or soreness, no redness, full mobility in it and on my run this morning it felt fine. It just looks, well, a bit like an old grannies cankle and not like one of mine. In fact the one of mine it looks least like is my right that looks as it has for as long as I remember.

Ho-hum. Anyway, my cankle managed the aforementioned run and also the trip to the Excel Centre in Docklands to pick up my race number and chip and a wander through the City and to Waterloo and it still feels fine. So there. It's not as bad as it was - and it was never horrific - but it is still not right. So today I wanderes to Morden to get a travelcard at 09:30 when travel cheapens as we go off-peak. I took a few pics on the way of cages and fences in places where there were none when I was a lad and thought a bit about how times have changed. Thoughts started at 'how sad it is that there is now all this caging and shit' and moved rapidly to 'yeah, but there were was no internet and MP3s and stuff.' Not sure I concluded what I preferred. Basically - I'm getting older.

I'd planned to meet my Bro at his office at 10:30 by which time his 10am meeting would be over. I arrived at 10:25, him a couple of minutes later. But meet we did and I collected my marathon paperwork that I needed in order to collect my race number and chip. I headed off via the Carphone Warehouse where I picked up a local SIM (no idea what my new number is.) I've now added Marathon Expo 2007 to London Motor Show 2006 and Dive Show 2004 to my Excel Centre visits and this was the shortest by far. In, collect, leave for the City.

I met Simon at lunchtime for a coffee and a chat and some gossip on how things were at my old place of employment, Kiln. Seems things are pretty well as they were when I left and that does not surprise me. It was good to catch up with him; he's one of the few folks I genuinely miss, despite being a northerner and therefore the sworn enemy of all southerners. Maybe I'm not a real southerner?

I left via the other reason I'd headed through the City and that was to see the new Willis building that is not yet finished but already dwafs and increasingly sad and tatty looking Lloyds building. I like the Lloyds building but it has definitely had it's day and now looks like the aircon unit for the surrounding, far flasher towers. A few more pictures and I started to wander to London Bridge (I bought my nipple vaseline on the way) from where I went down to the Thames Path and walked to Waterloo. On the way I stopped off for some lunch and watched a few old guys fishing from a pier, one of whom I saw pluck an eel from the inrushing tidal Thames. Not sure I'd eat anything pulled from the lower reaches of the Thames, but hey, I might...last thing of note was the South Bank grafitti spot that gets regulalrly redone. Its current incarnation is high on quantity but low on quality. Far too much mindless tag shit all over the place - literally all over. Colourful enough but artistically awful, in my humble...

About the only thing that shits me about my flashy new phone is that it does not mount as a drive when USBd (what a verb, sorry), so no pics on this entry just yet. They'll come.

Oh yeah, BBC was reporting 'hot an humid' for Sunday. Maybe those Sydney miles will come to my rescue after all.