"It really puts perspective on things, doesn't it?"

A funeral, a jogger, a car park and the passage of time. A little reminder of mortality and who, and what, matters most.

Nothing like death to put a little perspective on life. Or, as David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap infamoulsy said, “too much f***ing perspective.”

Life can be surreal at times. It can feel like you're having an out-of-body experience, even though you're not having an out-of-body experience and you're nowhere close to being dead. Or maybe, this is just a weird day for me and I’m rambling like a loon, in which case humour me please.

So, as I write this, I'm sitting in a car park, in a forest park to be precise. It's a place I used to frequent a lot over the years when I was younger, between my late teens and early forties. I haven’t been there for quite some time, until today.

And here I am, roughly 30 years later, and I'm sitting here in my car, observing the surroundings. The reason I'm here today is because I've taken someone to a funeral. I didn't go into the church to partake in the service, so I elected to go and sit and wait until the funeral was over, and then go and pick that person up. I knew where I would find a place to sit, and here I am. I'm looking around and the layout of this car park is the same as it always was, although they've laid some tarmac down. It used to be gravel, dirt, dead leaves and potholes that would fill up with rainwater to form a muddy stew in bad weather. But now it's all tarmac and they've put bricks down and they've put nice parking spaces, but generally the place is just the same.

And I'm observing things. I've just witnessed a jogger run (jog?) past, and it triggered memories of me coming here 10 or so years ago, when I was heavily into running. I got fit, and I was training for a half marathon and I can remember coming to this particular forest park and running around the lake four times in one night in what was for me, a long run. It was about eight miles. A lap was two miles. I did four laps and I was fit and I felt invincible.

And now I'm sitting here today, really badly out of shape, really, really badly out of shape. I would probably struggle to walk around that lake once, which is two miles, without getting out of breath. There's a lot of hills and a lot of twists and turns and jumping over logs and things like that. And I'm thinking, even 10 years ago, I could have ran around that comfortably four times and not even been out of breath.