It’s a week of interesting delays: delayed due to waiting for the other half of the train, delayed due to a broken down train in front of us, delayed because of poor track conditions, delayed because the overhead lines have been brought down by a rogue pantograph around Blackfriars.

This is my first cross-line run: Peterborough train to Hitchin, run to Letchworth then catch a connecting train to Royston. That’s the plan. I aim for Icknield and end up making a mess of directions, running in circles, in and out of blind alleys. I’ve developed a taste for chaotic jogs over new territory. Everything is new. I would never have seen these places otherwise.

Running the same route time and again starts to feel like work at some point. Familiarity sharpens sensitivity.

The arguments for our triviality and vulnerability are too obvious, too well known and too tedious to rehearse. What is interesting is that we may take it upon ourselves to approach tasks with utter determination and gravity even when their wider non-sense is clear. The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us. Good health encourages us to identify with all human experiences in all lands, to sigh at a murder in a faraway country, to hope for economic growth and technological progress far beyond the limits of our own lifespan, forgetting that we are never more than a few rogue cells away from the end.

Alain de Botton – The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

With new routes, new scenes, there’s a freshness, a lightness. There’s an alchemy, an allurement in every beginning, which protects us and helps us to live. (Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne, Der uns beschützt und der uns hilft, zu leben.)