Like every morning of my life, I love her very much, oh my God, yesterday I went out for a run.
(I have also done it today and I will also do it tomorrow, but today I stay in yesterday).
Yesterday I ran around London, as the newspaper has sent me to cover Wimbledon, and here I am, following Alcaraz and Djokovic, and in my spare time, in the morning, jogging.
When I travel and go running, I usually look for a park, the promenade or the riverbed (I like to go flat and fast), but recently a colleague had told me about Brompton cemetery.
–There are people jogging through the cemetery, and pedaling, and even walking the dog –the friend told me when he saw me raise an eyebrow.
“Okay, let’s try it,” I said to myself.
Well in my dear life I have trotted on snow and in thick forests and on highways and airports. But, in a cemetery?
I also had my doubts, I will not deny it either.
I was wondering: is this possible? Is it ethical?
Isn’t it a disrespectful act, isn’t it an offense, to sing a song to life and run among the tombstones of those who have abandoned us?
Curiosity got the better of me.
Overwhelmed by my reservations, I walked a mile from my hotel in Earls Court yesterday and walked into the cemetery, watching what the visitors were doing, whether they ran and pedaled and let the dog play, or rather stopped at the grave of a loved one, they changed the flowers and regretted his absence.
(They say that Beatrix Potter sat on their benches to write the stories of Peter Rabbit).
True: the runners ran and the cyclists pedaled and the mower napped, he took a breather sitting on a flagstone, so I took a look at some of the tombstones, all stone, with names and inscriptions chiselled by the carvers – on the spot Dozens of soldiers who died in the two world wars rest here -, and then I started jogging like any Londoner would.
And as I ran, listening to the silence, just the pounding of my footsteps, I began to feel how life was accelerating.
And I immersed myself, I remembered the beings that I have lost in recent times (my father-in-law, my dog, even my friend Sergi, who was also about to leave after a motorcycle accident, but he avoided the check) , and in their memory I left my life in a fast minute-slow minute fartlek, saying goodbye to all of them and also to you, because here I close my columns, until a few weeks from now, when I return from vacations.
(Though I’ll still be spending more days at Wimbledon, admiring the players still alive in the tournament draw.)
