Culture shock

After the fifth good night’s sleep since I got here, there’s a pounding on the front door at about 9am and I think who’s that? the post doesn’t come ‘til lunchtime and I think maybe I should just ignore it, if someone banged that loudly on my door in London I’d have jumped out of my skin and gone to hide in the bathroom or something but this isn’t London and then I think maybe it’s my OU stuff but I’m not expecting that ‘til Monday and I go downstairs and through the door I can see a DHL van and I think WOO HOO, MY OU STUFF IS HERE and I open the door and the DHL man comes over and hands me a parcel bearing the words URGENT – EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS ENCLOSED and his scanning machine doesn’t work and he keeps trying and keeps trying and I’m thinking JUST GIVE ME THE GODDAMN URGENT EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS and he keeps trying with the scanning machine and I say do you have a piece of paper I can sign instead? and he says no and then he gives up and says he’ll just write my name in it and I think in the olden days we’d have none of this palaver with scanning machines and I go inside with my urgent package and open it and I go upstairs and log in to the OU A215 forum and gloat tell everyone my package has arrived but no one else has got theirs yet and now they’re all waiting with their noses pressed against their windows waiting for the DHL man to bring them their urgent educational materials and then I’m stuck between wanting to have a good browse through my OU stuff and going out for the run I told myself I was going to do and I post my dilemma on Facebook and the man from roadrunning.net says split the difference and go cycling, then you won’t feel guilty and I think oooooooooooooooh, good idea but then I think I might still feel guilty and my urgent educational materials will still be here when I get back and so I put on my running gear and go outside and I get round the corner and a woman with a kid pulls the kid over to the side so I can get past and further up the road a woman pulls into the side and stops to let me go past and I think does she think I’m that fat? there’s enough room for both of us and I say thanks and these polite people are freaking me out and I think there’s no need to be this polite, I’m from London, I’m used to people knocking me off the pavement, I can take it and I get round another corner and there’s a bike leaning against a wall and I think cool bike and then I see it’s an official Royal Mail bike and I think cool again and maybe I should be a postie so I get a cool bike and there’s a man running up the road ahead of me and I wonder if he’s running or just running as he looks like he’s wearing a normal short sleeved shirt and not a short sleeved t-shirt or running shirt and I wonder why he’s running and then I see the postie up further ahead of him and I wonder if he’s running after the postie and the postie goes into someone’s garden and the man follows her and I go past the house and the man has got a letter in his hand and he’s patting a dog and the dog’s owner’s there and the postie’s there and they’re all having a good chinwag and I’m thinking that’s not the sort of thing you see in London, the dog would be barking at the postie and the man who wanted his letter would be calling the postie a f*****g w****r or something for not waiting for him to answer the door and the postie wouldn’t have left her bike unattended two hundred feet away as it would get stolen and I carry on going and someone behind me says morning and I look behind me and there’s a man in an electric wheelchair and I say morning back and he overtakes me and I wonder if it’s shameful to be overtaken by someone in a wheelchair and I decide not if it’s an electric one but it would probably be shameful if I got overtaken by someone in a manual one or whatever you call it and I go past the vegetable house and there’s still no vegetables there and there’s temporary traffic lights on the corner where I want to turn off and I’m hoping the road’s not closed and I get to the corner and there’s just a little hole they’re digging and I wonder why they have to stop the traffic to get round the little hole but the road’s not closed and I realise I haven’t seen any traffic yet and then I think I’ve just tempted fate and now I will see lots of traffic and I do indeed see a car go past in the distance and I turn round the next corner and a horse trailer overtakes me and then two trucks go past on the other side and then there’s a motorbike and then a man on a pushbike nods and smiles at me and I go past the house that had the bikes outside it for £10 and they’re back again and also on a table is a metal thing with a sign saying £85 and I think if I had something worth £85 I wouldn’t a) put it in my front garden; and b) put a big sign next to it pointing out how much it’s worth and I think it’s a good thing country people live in the country as they wouldn’t last five minutes in London if they kept on chasing posties and going into people’s gardens and leaving vegetables and money and valuable metal things outside their houses and I get back to a pavementy bit and I wonder if I should go the long way home and I decide I need to go back and inspect my urgent educational materials and I wonder if I can run up the hill but I decide to quit while I’m ahead and stop my Garmin and walk when I get to the corner after 3.1 miles.

Stats:
Distance: 3.12 miles
Time: 33:17
Pace: 10:41 m/m
Calories: 323  
Packages containing urgent educational materials: 1
Women with kids getting out of my way:1
Women thinking I’m too fat to get past her: 1
Cool Royal Mail bikes: 1
Men running after posties: 1
Men in electric wheelchairs overtaking me: 1
Cars: 1
Horse trailers: 1
Trucks: 2
Motorbikes: 1
Men on pushbikes: 1
Bikes for £10 for sale: 2
Metal things for £85 for sale: 1
Hills run up: 0 
Music:
New Model Army
The Cure