Morning Gloom

Autumn is upon us. I ran 5 miles to Muswell Hill and back in the dark this morning.

Darkness pervaded the run in more ways than one: I forgot my watch; and I was listening to the BBC’s dramatisation of Life and Fate – the episode about the Holocaust. Returning to the flat, I felt a wave of relief. The clock was ticking on the wall, the sun was rising and the Today programme was reporting on Afghanistan, not Stalingrad.

I wouldn’t recommend running alone through dark streets listening to the sound of Eichmann eating lunch with a colleague in their freshly constructed gas chamber. I suppose there is no appropriate time to listen to this story, and that the important thing is that I listened at all, but I felt bad that it was the soundtrack to my leisure pursuit.