Foro Italico parkrun, Sicily
In Italy, warm if blustery. In England, cold, snowy in parts. I could not have timed my trip better. It was even better for my being unable to envision cold, and sometimes wondering what Brits were on about when they talked of conditions making things difficult. Sure, the wind got up a couple of times, blowing sand and grit at us. And parkrun coincided with a sky very clear of clouds, making for a genuinely hot run despite it only reaching 18 degrees. But difficulties? Ah, right, yes - a different place, feeling like a very different one for this weekend. And that’s before you are faced with piles of tomatoes and other produce to really remind you just how different things are here. They are there despite difficulties with the harvest, but there is another reason, in the main just one, the one the government won’t discuss with any honesty, preventing those piles being replicated throughout the UK.
It has been a more-than-usually complicated couple of weeks for conservatives in the UK. First up, how can a person do one thing and then, a week or a month later, do a different thing? How can I possibly have been at Mount Etna last week, run there and talked to those people, without thinking about and talking about Palermo this weekend? I must surely have had it in mind, it must have affected my time there? And yet it did not. I didn’t even pick a parkrun in Palermo till Friday night, having the choice of three, all walkable from the centre; realistically, two, because I had already run Favorita.
As it was, I walked down to the waterfront early in the morning, finding the small Parco della Salute (just to the South of Palermo’s port) already in use by people exercising, with parkrun volunteers setting up a flag and some cones down the middle of the park just after 8:30. Some military Brits who had turned up at Etna last weekend picked this run, purely by luck, so I joined them and a small group of us was greeted warmly by the volunteers, and were lucky enough to have the course explained by a regular volunteer who spent several years in London.
Looking at news from the UK, the British right have distracted themselves from performative confusion over how someone can possibly change jobs *now* without compromising themselves *in the past* to get very confused over cancel culture and freedom of speech (we didn’t mean free! We meant subject to recommendations. Yes, okay, those recommendations that it clearly doesn’t breach. But still). The former is a classic right-wing tactic, to complain about what does happen (people get disagreed with more easily and volubly these days), add a slippery slope to what might happen (they disappear from view) and then having invented a thing, weaponise it. All those people who complain about it via national publications think cancellation is an actual problem but, like Theresa May pretending (or perhaps really believing) she couldn’t deport someone because of their cat, it isn’t. Meanwhile, an anodyne and provably realistic statement is exaggerated and the speaker removed from his job, at least temporarily - with disingenuous language that he “steps back”. I’ve not yet been fired or suspended, but if I am, I will not have ‘stepped back’.
To return to parkrun as an example, Brits are perfectly free to claim this event is 25 laps and covers 55km. But it doesn’t, and if they do that, people will disagree. If the matter is settled and then raised again years later, they’ll still disagree, though the sensible will reluctantly accept that we do need to win the argument all over again. It’s a three-lap course, meaning you run the whole course 3 times - we had debated, before finding out, whether we’d do three laps of the main loop before coming back, but no, it includes the slightly-fiddlier to navigate section going in and out of the park. No actual problem, you just need to pay attention.
The course takes you anti-clockwise, so takes you on the road-side first before a left-turn (marshalled on this weekend) to follow a path (take the left-most option) down to the waterside. That road-side section passes a lot of calf-high bollards, or skittles as they call them. Once you’re past them, turn left.
There’s a nice cafe next to the park, which the team head to afterwards. The croissants looked good, but I just had an orange juice, listened to the creaking of the huge weather vane and then had a wander in the sun. I walked along the front to the botanic gardens and up Via Lincoln, which is studded with ornate buildings. Frankly, it was all good in the sun.
Results from Foro Italico parkrun, #167, 11/3/2023; 14 finishers.