After an intense Christmas and freezing cold New Year, things are seriously hotting up in Rhal-land. 2012 turned out to be a tricky year, so towards the end of it I was feeling fed up. Relocating to the wilderness 400 miles away from friends and family with no reliable income, no transport and no idea was bound to be challenging. But then my one saving grace (running) started playing up (dodgy knee) and I really began to lose hope.

I rely on running a great deal to sort my shit out. It makes me feel good about myself, look better naked, and I find the process meditative and incredibly healing. Not being able to run is a bit like having a limb removed or losing your iPhone. IT JUST MAKES EVERYTHING HARDER. Pray for my poorly leg, dear friends.

Add an injured Ultraboy into the mix (he recently had arm surgery following a kayaking accident, and can’t even tie his own shoes right now) and you get a serious case of cabin fever. But aside from a limp limb and an armless ultra runner, I’m pleased to say that, thanks to Divine Providence, Chaka Khan and the back up of some truly excellent girlfriends, things are on the up. Okay, Chaka Khan didn’t actually do anything. But her mere presence in the universe makes everything better.

I was recently offered a job at The Hawick News, my local Scottish Borders newspaper, and it has made the world of difference to Operation City Chick in the Sticks. Writing for a weekly paper is immensely challenging, fun and interesting and a great way to get to know the area and the lovely people in it. Plus it gets me out the house and away from those chickens. Learning to communicate with human beings again has been fun… Bekerrrr.

I’m also delighted to have been asked to speak at Write This Run, a cool new running blogger event in May. You can still get tickets Here so come on down to London and listen to me crack jokes about chickens, err, I mean talk expertly about hill running. And by May my bloody leg is bound to have healed, so I’ll be running about the fields with the baby lambs and will have loads to say.

Running = sexy

On that note, I should probably write a blog about running too. But I caved in and bought a scooter instead. Balls to running up hills, from now on I intend to breeze up them at a comfortable 30 mph. In the absence of anything useful to say about my favourite sport, go out and buy the latest issue of Women’s Running magazine instead. I heard a rumour that someone might have managed to persuade the editor Chris to publish an article on the two greatest pastimes ever invented, sex and running. Oh yeeeeah.

 

The title of today’s blog is not a plea for sympathy, it’s a veiled reference to one of my favourite Korean films, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, from an ultra-violent trilogy based on obsession and revenge. It has sod all to do with my current circumstances, but I am seriously considering calling my next chicken Lady Vengeance.

Anyhoo back to the job at hand. Lady Fate (not Vengeance) is a shrewd woman. She knows what she’s doing. Just when I was starting to get really fed up of cycling into the wind (literally and metaphorically, as I still haven’t learned to drive yet) and felt like my brave adventures in the Scottish undergrowth were turning into a farce, she stepped in and steered me in a new direction. I can only assume it was Lady Fate or some otherworldly force, because I’d all but given up.

I really love it here. I love the hills and the endless sky and the freakishly soft water that makes every day a good hair day. But sometimes living in the arse end of nowhere 350 miles away from home sucks a bit. As much as I love my volcanic view, I miss my girlfriends, I miss my family, I miss wasting money on shoes, I miss having a reliable income and I miss living within spitting distance of a shop that sells bog roll and butterscotch chocolate. Or even plain chocolate. A Dairy Milk would do. Alas a visit to the chocolate shop involves a 7-mile round trip on my bike; usually face first into the wind. Burning it off before you’ve even licked it bizarrely takes away the sinful pleasure of pigging out on chocolate. It’s just not as much fun if it’s not a bit naughty.

My bag of woes has probably been weighed down with the business of not running enough. As all you die-hard running fanatics will attest, once you’ve been inducted into the cult of running, injury is your greatest foe. Although it’s just a wee niggle, it’s enough to prevent me from properly hitting the trails, and subsequently I confess, when I read your Twitter updates about how great your running is going, I might secretly want to kill you all in a blaze of Lady Vengeance style kung fu. Sorry about that.

But after a couple of days of festering in self-pity, perhaps because I’ve stopped trying to control everything and resigned to roll with the punches, things in the land of haggis took an unexpected turn and have since started to improve. I answered an ad in the local paper and got a job copy-editing for a local business which I absolutely adore. In a merry trilogy of gainful employment, I also got a job tutoring, which is great fun and very rewarding. Then a last minute call came through to help out at the Hawick News. Check out the sexy floating head.

Hot off the press: The Hawick News

So I’ve been busy writing and teaching and peddling furiously into the wind. Although I haven’t been doing much running, my new friends The Runner Beans have been absolutely lovely. I promise to train more with them when the suspicious knee rights itself. I’ve been riding like a wild cat instead. Cycling 50+ miles a week in adverse weather conditions sucks a bit, but has resulted in some unexpectedly pleasing thigh tone-age. If only it were warm enough to show off these newly honed mountain-thighs in my trusty sequin hotpants…

Since bothering to change my bank details and managing to survive one whole month in The Borders, I think I may now officially be a Scottish resident. Against the odds I’ve endured four weeks of solitude, relentless rain, enormous hills, undecipherable local lingo and the company of one very handsome but rather grumpy Scotsman. I think I may stay a while…

Thank you for all of your advice on assimilating into Scottish life. Since last week’s blog 10 things I know about Scotland I’ve also learnt some cool new phrases; bogal being my favourite. It means window shopping/having a look, and it’s a Jamaican dance craze. I’m still none the wiser as to what ‘the back of nine’ means. There appears to be a few regional variations to this one. But I am now safely armed with enough local lingo to know that Ken is a word and not a bloke and eating chips with absolutely everything is common practice.

Since mastering the art of communication, I finally mustered up the courage to visit a local physio and get my suspicious knee looked at. She pummelled me to within an inch of my life leaving actual visible bruises in her wake, so I definitely got my money’s worth. Fortunately it turns out I’ve just pulled a muscle in my thigh, so Rhalourella will run to the ball again.

Don’t be fooled by the foam roller’s unassuming appearance

Since then, upon advice, I’ve invested in a foam roller. Despite working in fitness publishing for a few years now, I’ve never actually investigated the murky world of foam rolling before. Ultraboy was sceptical about the introduction of a foam roller in our life, arguing that it was a fad. He studied at the school of true grit and cut his fitness teeth sneaking up sheer rock faces and kayaking down voluptuous gorges before he could even talk, so he didn’t see the point in a puny roll of foam, arguing that a little 20-mile run round the block would sort out his aches and pains. But I forced him to have a go anyway, because I’m a girl, and we have mystical powers that make even the most stubborn Scotsmen do what we want. So I made him mount my puny roll of blue foam on the living room carpet, and sat back to watch him wince like a little girl.

I’m not really a secret sadist and Ultraboy is still the distilled essence of badass. Even in his currently injured state (catastrophic kayaking accident ripped his arm from his socket and now it pops out all the time) he’s the fittest person I know. But even the baddest man in town is no match for a foam roller. Those compact tubes of bubble-filled rubber really bloody hurt. Especially if you’re a runner with thighs like tightly wound granite. It’s like they seek out the pain and drill laser death rays through their tubular foaminess and straight into your soul. Don’t believe me? Jump onboard a foam roller for five minutes and call me back. I defy you not to cry for your mama after stiff foam and IT Band meet and get to know each other intimately upon your thigh.

Even the chickens are sceptical

Despite the extreme agonising pain, the evil roll of foam has now become a staple part of our nightly routine and we’ve been taking turns to sodomise our thighs in front of the telly. It makes quite a fun spectator sport. Here’s hoping that a few weeks of extreme rollering will result in two lean, mean running machines that conquer any race thrown our way. Failing that, it doubles up as a brightly coloured chicken viewing platform.

Meanwhile back on the ranch, to supplement my writing I’ve been helping out some friends Tim and Phil with their bootcamp Sexy in the City. I grew up on the same street as Tim and we’ve been friends since we were about 4. Together the boys run bootcamps that offer fun and friendly workout sessions for city chicks. If any of you happen to live near London Liverpool Street and fancy honing your body to shmoking hot sexy proportions, tell them I sent you. If only Sexy in the City operated in the wilderness too. But Sexy in the Boggy Field doesn’t have quite the same ring to it…

Week two of Operation Rhalou in the wilderness and I seem to be settling into country life okay. Thankfully last week’s Chickengate was solved by a quick visit to the local donkey sanctuary that doubles up as a chicken petting zoo. They kindly took Monty the evil ginger cock off our hands in exchange for three considerably less threatening Silkie chickens, who I’ve collectively christened Chaka Khan.

Chaka Chicken Khan

Curiously, since we waved goodbye to Monty, his fellow rooster Freddie has stepped up to alpha mode and started lording it about the garden. What is it about men? Even in chicken form must they be forever locked in an archaic battle for supremacy?

I was hoping to have something a bit more rock ‘n’ roll to blog about this week than poultry. Life may be quiet in the country, but chickens alone are not enough to sustain a blog. Unless you write a blog specifically about chickens that is, in which case, my apologies, chickens are great. My intention was to write about running, but I haven’t done very much, due to a self-diagnosed IT band injury. But arguably self-diagnosis and doing sod all about it definitely makes me a typical runner, even if I’m not currently doing very much running.

I should probably stay in rival chicken bloggers good books anyway, because I suspect I may be inadvertently developing a chicken fetish. And since writing exclusively about running at Women’s Running magazine for nearly three years, maybe it’s time to spread my wings and write about something a bit more existential. Like birds.

If you don’t have anyone else to chat to, chickens certainly do start to take on a whole new level of importance. Those feathered friends have become my family. I eat most of my meals in their company, I study them obsessively (they’re like mini dinosaurs!) and even meditate amongst the mystic chickens. Okay that’s a lie, I find it impossible to sit still for that long, but their mere presence is quite meditative. If only chickens could run 10K at a comfortable pace, or bitch about boys over a glass of Merlot on Thursday nights.

Anyway before I change the name of this blog to City Chicken in the Sticks, let’s get back to the job in hand. The next obstacle in Rhalou versus country life is only marginally less pathetic than being scared of maverick poultry. This week I have mostly been grappling with the fear of being alone. Not in a spiritual sense (I welcome spiritual enlightenment, hence the bold move to the wilderness) but the fear of actually being alone, all by myself, all night long, in the middle of nowhere, with nobody to hear me scream…

Ultraboy is off to run a race in the highlands this weekend, leaving me home alone with the chickens. Ordinarily I’d relish the opportunity for a bit of Rhalou-time, so I could secretly watch One Born Every Minute, get drunk, eat Rocky Road and paint my toes pirate red at the kitchen table. But that was when I lived in a flat surrounded by six billion people, so I could still hear my neighbours farting through the walls. There’s being alone, and then there’s being alone, in the wilderness, with no car and no sense of direction, and a rusty torture chamber in the cellar. Okay I lied about the torture chamber bit too, Ultraboy gets his kicks from torturing me in a hill running sense, but the rest is all true. I have to spend one night on my own in the house on the hill in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and I am shitting myself.

I know the crime rate in The Borders is considerably lower than London. Plus after finding a dead body in my back garden in Hackney a couple of years ago and witnessing a shooting in London Fields (both true) I’ve probably used up my horror quota for a lifetime. But combine the house, the hill, the rain, the woman alone and the wilderness, and my weekend definitely possesses all the ingredients for a classic horror film. Except for the gang of horny young teens on spring break required to get picked off one-by-one by the serial killer/monster/tribe of zombies in the lead up to my gory finale, but that’s just a minor plot detail.

I’ve seen The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre enough times to know slutty redheads rarely make it out of the woods alive. The surviving role is almost always saved for the brunette. And when the aliens do land in the garden, I can’t even run away! My IT band injury is practically begging for an axe-wielding murderer to chase me limping through the undergrowth. I’m just thankful I’m not a blonde; they always get chopped up before the intermission.

Arguably I could just jump on the train to London, or call my Dad who lives 20 miles up the road, or beg Ultraboy to take me to the highlands to share a tent/car/hostel with his sweaty ultra runner mates (sexy). But as shit scared as I am about being on my own in the arse crack of nowhere with nothing but a flock of chickens to protect me from the antichrist, I need to suck it up and be alone at some point, so it might as well be now. If I’m really going to morph into a fully-functioning country girl, I’m going to have to man-up and I’m going to have to do it fast.

If anyone reading this does happen to be a serial killer/monster/tribe of zombies, please don’t come to The Borders and kill me in a complex yet visually exhilarating way this weekend. But do feel free to come and visit! I’d love to have a guest or two for the weekend. We could have a nice cup of tea and talk to the chickens. Chickens are really great.

After several months of meticulous planning, I finally made it to Scotland to begin my new life of hill running and romancing under the stars. I always knew the transition from Shoreditch to The Borders was going to be a tough one. Not least because I’m used to living in zone two with six billion other people and 24-hour hummus on tap (yes I know, there are probably far more exciting things one can acquire after-hours in the great city of London, but hummus is the distilled essence of the Gods). So what’s the real reason the big move to the wilderness was bound to be particularly challenging? My new rural abode is located in the ass end of nowhere, an hour from the nearest train station, and I don’t actually know how to drive…

Not only am I clueless to the rules of the road, but I don’t have a bicycle, or a helicopter, or a unicorn. And there just aren’t enough people living on this particular hill out here in the sticks to justify a frequent bus service. We do live near a really nice donkey sanctuary with 71 different funky donkeys to choose from, but after three days of country life, I haven’t quite plummeted to donkey-riding depths just yet. If cabin fever really starts to set in, I’ll wait until Christmas Eve and charter an old donkey to carry me to a local barn, so I can lie down in the hay and give birth to Jesus Christ. But if miracles do occur, I’d prefer to have a driving licence and a snazzy new car than the trials of mothering the new messiah. Plus I have only just moved in with the boyfriend, so one step at a time.

So until I learn to master the art of driving, I’m not going anywhere. And before anyone suggests running to the nearest hummus shop, I’ve knackered my knee (great start to my hill running career) so basically I’m stranded in no man’s land like a fish without a bicycle, or a driving licence. But curiously, despite my concerns when I was back in the heaving metropolis, living in the wilderness without any reliable transportation is actually the least of my worries. After living in Hackney for the past six years, I’m really enjoying the peace and quiet. The biggest obstacle to my future happiness is in fact much smaller, fluffier and more inherently evil than any of life’s transportation woes. I’m talking about my new nemesis, my boyfriend’s cock, Monty.

Monty the evil ginger cock

No I haven’t christened my boyfriend’s manly cluster in homage to Judy Bloom’s Forever, (my first foray into early sexuality when Jackie magazine couldn’t provide the answers. What did she call his willy? Roly?) When I say cock, I mean cockerel. A Polish Frizzle to be precise. But not just any Polish Frizzle. Monty is a mean ass cockerel who wants my blood. I swear the frizzly little fucker is out to get me.

As with most cockerels, Monty likes to make the first morning call. Except he thinks 4am is an acceptable time for the world to wake up (that’s when I used to go to bed, oh how times have changed). Despite his antisocial timekeeping, Monty is actually hilariously funny to watch in action. He minces about the garden in a stately manner and parades in front of his hens with one wing raised like a bull fighter, whipping his red cape about in preparation for battle.

But despite being a fortuitous comedian, Monty is one vicious chicken and he rules his roost with a steely resolve. In the pecking order, he’s the top dog, and everyone must obey him, including me. Consequently, if I try to cross the garden to do something really ghastly, like feed him or clean out his water tray, Monty will go for me, wings, talons, beak and all. He’s drawn blood twice now. If he came in human form, he’d be Dorian Gray and hide a picture of his evil tarnished soul inside his chicken coop.

Even though Monty is only ankle-high, I confess I’m secretly terrified of the evil little rooster. I’ve been avoiding the garden at all costs, but he still stalks the outside walls and seems to know exactly which window ledge to jump on in order to stare through the glass and straight into my soul. I swear to God he’s out to get me. Arguably I should just drop kick the little bastard into the ether, but I’m a vegetarian and I don’t possess the fighting spirit. Plus I’m already rather attached to the lovely organic eggs his girlfriends have been laying and fear assaulting their alpha may put them off the job in hand.

The only individual in our manor that Monty does not bully is Ultraboy. But I imagine a six-foot Scotsman striding through the morning mist brandishing a bucket of seed would be an imposing sight even if you’re not a seemingly innocuous but secretly evil cockerel. Or perhaps Monty is locked in some ancient love rival battle, and believes that Ultraboy is his one true love?

Whatever the sadistic chickens’ intentions, now that I live here, it’s time for me to man up. I didn’t emigrate to the wilderness without a driving licence only to get beaten by a vicious little cock with a chip on its wing. So step two in this city chicks assimilation into country life, vanquish the vicious chicken before it gets me! Then all I have to do is book a driving lesson, learn the local lingo and become an expert hill runner. Not sure which is scarier actually…