Beware taking up running in your fifties

Spectator

18-06-2025

Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We'd met the previous week at the Auckland Writers' Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers' Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more likely to travel halfway round the world if a few potentially sizeable crowds are waiting for them. A.C. Grayling, who I broke bread with in Auckland and saw again in Sydney, seemed to have scored the most palpable hit by being invited to be philosopher-in-residence at a festival in Margaret River, centre of Australia's most prestigious wine region. It was déjà-vu as I kept bumping into Lemn Sissay, Samantha Harvey, Philippe Sands and Colm Tóibín, Colm reminding me that I'd once advised him to improve his sales by adding the occasional murder.
Back to those injuries. I took up 'running' in my fifties. I put the word in inverted commas because the most I can usually manage is 5k at a pace somewhere below a slow trot. But I've grown to enjoy it, and whenever I go somewhere new I like to go for a run to get a feel for the place. Having flown from Auckland to Brisbane, I duly set out before breakfast, only to be undone by a particularly vicious stretch of uneven pavement. Back at the hotel, my wife dressed my wounds so we could enjoy breakfast before seeing a doctor. Nothing needed stitching, but I was sporting so many plasters and bandages that I felt mummified. The doctor seemed most concerned about my elbow: 'But I can't quite see bone,' she concluded cheerily. Sharing the story afterwards, I learned that people my age (65) don't actually fall. Rather we 'have a fall'. This is the stage of my life I have reached.
The trip (hah!) had begun with a long flight (Edinburgh-Doha) followed by an even longer one (Doha-Auckland). We found ourselves exiting the international terminal in New Zealand at around 3.30 a.m., only to find that the domestic terminal (we were heading to South Island) didn't open for another 90 minutes. Joy. But things improved once we'd reached Nelson and rented a car. We headed for the wineries of Marlborough, where our first cellar-door tasting was hosted by a chap from Wales. So obviously we talked about the Welsh-speaking community of Gaiman in Patagonia – something I knew nothing about prior to visiting the place during a South American cruise a couple of months earlier. My wife Miranda has a knack for booking holidays. The cruise lasted over 50 days, during which time we circumnavigated South America. Once home, we just had time to do the laundry before we were off to Lisbon for my birthday – the day itself coinciding with a power cut that blacked out the whole of Portugal. Having survived that, we were ready to repack for the Antipodes.
Which would be fine, except that a while back I signed up to write a new novel. I did the plotting and planning during the cruise's many sea days, but there hasn't been much time since then to actually write the story. I lugged all my notes and as much of the first draft as exists to New Zealand, but never felt the need to remove any of it from my bag: there always seemed to be another wine region, art gallery or bookshop to visit. It was especially interesting to see the changes in Christchurch since my last visit in 2017. The shipping containers – turned into everything from shops to wine bars after the 2011 earthquake – have all gone. A few buildings remain to be demolished and progress on the cathedral has come to a halt due to lack of money, but the city itself was buzzing and the 'cardboard' cathedral (built as a temporary replacement) is as glorious as I remembered it.
After the Sydney Writers' Festival we tacked on a bit more holiday, which involved the wineries around Adelaide and then three days on the Ghan, a well-appointed train that chugs its way north to Alice Springs and Darwin. This, I thought, was when I'd get down to doing some actual work – but the scenery rolled past, hypnotic in its intense, ever-changing sameness, and I became fascinated by the parade of termite hills. The book stayed where it was.
Novels need to be credible while the real world does not. In a doctor's waiting room in Sydney, where my injuries were to be reassessed and the dressings changed, a man walked in with his elderly mother and sat down opposite. 'Ian?' he said. This was Andrew, who used to be my publicist back in the day, and is just about the only person I know in the city. His mother had had a fall…