Exercise log

12km in 30:00, exercise bike. Benchpress: was a mess, moved out of the Smith cage, had trouble lifting 3x10 30kg. Bicep curl: also a mess, 2x12 14kg. Back extensions, 3x10. 2 miles treadmill in 26:20. Rowing cooldown, 1km in 5:15.

Mass: 102.4-103.2kg

Cities?

Yesterday I had one of those sleepy epiphanies that seem obvious in retrospect, riding the train to town. Well, not so much an epiphany as a dawning of the obvious. The city, in fantasy, is symbol as much as setting. It stands for something, or several somethings - civilisation, decadence, predation, community, separation/alienation - it can be a concretised metaphor. Its geography and architecture is particularly amenable to this sort of concretisation.

But it can also be a locus of the fantastic. The modern city is interpenetrated with the wild, in parks and dead ground and farmland/greenbelt in its suburban accretions, in its foxes foraging from dustbins and bats in cathedral steeples. It's also interpenetrated with history, the new and the ancient co-existing in the same space, the old repurposed for the modern. Its nature makes it a focus for liminalities, and an attractor of stories which grow in the telling.

A city is a thing of edges, and also connections: bridges, transitions, communities.