Stick to Hyde Park

I’ve been away on a work conference in Eastbourne for the last couple of days. The conference was fine, as these things go, but one evening after the sessions, I thought it would be a good idea to clear my head by taking a quick jog and visiting the famous Beachy Head. Big mistake. I got up as far as the famous suicide drop without incident, on a pleasantly warm Autumn evening. But then the sun went down like a brick in a swimming pool. Living in central London, I had forgotten that it actually gets dark at night in some places. Apparently, where this phenomenon occurs, the transition from light to dark happens quite quickly. Who knew!? How dangerous!

Anyway, this left me running backwards and forwards in the blackness trying to find the path back to Eastbourne without inadvertently plummeting off the edge of the cliff. It was getting quite scary. Also, the headline would have been bad: — “Conference so dire that delegate leaps from Beachy Head”. In the end, after running halfway back to Eastbourne along what I had thought was the path only for it to disappear into featureless scrub dropping off towards the sea, I decided that I’d had enough and struck out inland in the direction of a light, eventually happening upon a pub, from which I called for a taxi.

Labels: training