Keep on running to find your dreams

SPLASHING out on a new pair of running trainers and a bit of an upturn in the weather (before this week, anyway) has led me to get back to running lately.

I’d forgotten what a buzz you get from pounding the streets for a few miles – once the pain recedes, anyway. While it might not be great for your knees or joints, the benefits of such a high-intensity form of exercise make a difference to both mind and body, especially once you get into better shape.

It’s also surprising how much you learn about your surrounding areas by lacing up your trainers and feeling the burn of a good run in your legs.

The main problem with running in and around Plymouth is hills – unless that is what you are seeking, and then you’re in heaven.

For most runners, flatter routes are much better, so you can find a pace and a rhythm which works for you and you can maintain. As well as avoiding the burn of steep hills that sap your energy for the rest of your session.

So I seem to have settled on a route which takes me alongside a part of the River Plym, with the bonus that I get to jog through a leafy and wooded National Trust estate, Saltram.

It’s not all oak leaves and dappled sunlight, though, as I also, variously, run via several less salubrious areas, including some graffiti-laden waste ground underneath the A38 flyover, through a supermarket car park, and past the tip – sorry, waste recycling facility.

I have also noticed quite a few camper vans lined up along city streets, and looking suspiciously like they may be lived in at the time.

I ran past several beside a park and near a railway underpass, and shadows of people moved about behind milky, plastic windows.

I’ve been told that there has been a growth in the number of people who are living in this type of temporary accommodation, though the reasons behind it are probably varied.

There is without doubt a shortage of rental accommodation available, with a raft of new measures and a spike in house prices having led plenty of landlords to simply decide it was easier to sell up.

The prospect of obliging rented properties to adhere to a certain standard of energy efficiency has also had the effect of scaring more landlords into selling rather than risk not being able to let their properties.

Consequently, what little property there is available on the rental market is going for a premium, often for much more than you would pay for a mortgage on a much bigger home.

Facing all that, buying a motorhome or campervan and finding somewhere to park up and call home doesn’t sound like a terrible idea – though that’s easier to say in spring than in winter. I’ve seen the same with barges being moored up on rivers and canals and acting as de facto homes – including one which even had solar panels put up so they could generate their own electricity. Genius.

Just as many ferry operators, long before P&O carried out their illjudged mass sackings, have run their ships using crew who are happy to accept far less than the UK minimum wage, maybe people living in such a way is just the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’.

Until more genuinely affordable homes are built, or unless the wages which we are paid are more in line with the cost of a home – which seems naive at best – maybe this is the sort of world we now live in.

Thinking of all of this does make you more grateful for having a home to go back to at the end of the day, even if it’s not your dream home.

A bit like running, sometimes you just have to keep going and hope you end up somewhere nice.

Maybe people living in such a way is just the unacceptable face of capitalism