Kerry Buckley

On time this week (assuming I keep typing and press publish before the evening’s out).

It finally got cold, barely getting above freezing for a few days, then suddenly hit 17°C again on Sunday. I turned my heating on, then turned it off again (to paraphrase the old Aardman ad, although I don’t “heat electric”).

On Monday morning there seemed to be a lot of noisy magpies in the garden. Then while I was making coffee Badger cat dragged one of them in through the flap. I initially assumed it was dead, then it started hopping round the kitchen and perching on chairs. It seemed like it might have had an injured wing, but maybe not too seriously, so (mindful of Dave’s tale of being on the brink of dropping a rock onto what he thought was a fatally injured pigeon when it flew off) I caught it and released it over the fence into next door’s garden to give it a fighting chance.

On Thursday we had an office volunteering day at the Suffolk Owl Sanctuary, digging out a load of sand and wheelbarrowing it away. It wasn’t all hard work though – we got a flying display, and got to see all the owls, plus meerkats and armadillos.

Sunday was the Hadleigh 10, with Storm Bert in full effect. Fortunately we only got the wind though, and no rain. The race was a slog, and several minutes slower than when I last ran it a couple of years ago. I need to somehow find some form over the winter in time for London!

I still haven’t put my TV aerial up, but figured I should probably leave getting up on the roof for a weekend without 50mph gusts.

Oops, nearly forgot. Only four days late.

I got an email from Anglian Water saying there’s been a “small increase” in my water usage, and they’re increasing my payments “to match”. I had been paying £7 a month, which admittedly did seem a bit low, but apparently it’s now increasing to £36! I looked into it, and last month I only used 14% more than the same month in 2023. I think what happened is that they read the meter after a long gap, and adjusted the payment accordingly, but I suspect they’ve gone too far in the other direction and I’ll end up building up a credit balance. This is why I specifically sought out a gas and electricity tariff where they just send me a bill each month for the amount I’ve used and I pay it by direct debit, rather than faffing around with trying to guess the monthly average across the year.

I had the week off work, and as usual did hardly any of the things on my notional to-do list. I did finally remove and saw up the two fallen branches from the apple tree though (after only a couple of years), although I’m yet to get rid of the logs and branches. This has returned about half what I’ll optimistically call my lawn (it took longer to get the brambles out of the way than it did to remove the actual branches), but I still have a way to go to clear enough space to finally put the greenhouse up.

I glanced up while eating breakfast on Wednesday and there was a woodpecker in the remains of the apple tree. I only managed to get a terrible photo though.

On Saturday I went on another of the Camra “Real Ale Runabout” bus tours, this time to Aldeburgh. It was a fun day, even if there was quite a wait to get served in a couple of the pubs, and the choice was basically down to which Adnams beer you wanted. We got the back seet in the bus too!

Sunday was my birthday, but I decided to treat Saturday as the celebration so I didn’t really do anything, other than a bit of solo trail running.

Not content with waking up on Wednesday to the news that the US was about to reelect the worst president of modern times (this time without any pretence from half the country of not knowing exactly what they were voting for), Duolingo then decided to troll me with this:

On a less depressing note, here’s a better photo of the fox, from one of his daylight visits:

Sunday was the Stowmarket Scenic 7, and after feeling ridiculously out of breath on a very slow run on Friday I wasn’t expecting much. It didn’t go too badly in the end though – only a couple of seconds slower than last year. I ran most of it with or just behind Holly, then unchivalrously out-sprinted her to the line, which I think I’ll be getting stick for for a while!

The YouView app on my TV updated itself at some point, undoing my downgrade and removing the Channel 4 app again (although the actual programmes are still available if you search). I guess I’m going to have to put an aerial up after all. The only plus point is that from my research on which one to buy it appears that reception here has vastly improved since last time I looked (we used to be in a sector of the output from Sudbury that was attenuated to avoid interference with the continent).

There was some weird (presumably BST/GMT-change-related in some way) glitch on the council web site at the weekend, that had it showing everyone’s bins as due to be collected a day early. I actually put mine out, which I forget to do half the time even on the normal day, but no, they were collected on Wednesday as usual. Except for the brown one, which lingered un-emptied until Thursday.

The fox is still dropping by now and again looking for food, and still isn’t bothered by the cats (or vice versa).

My TV suddenly started refusing to connect to iPlayer etc, which isn’t ideal as I don’t have an aerial. Resetting the TV/YouView app brought iPlayer and Channel 5 back, but ITV and Channel 4 had disappeared. I’m not bothered about ITV or 5, but the lack of Channel 4 made it harder (but not impossible) to watch Taskmaster. Digging around on some forums lots of people seemed adamant that it’s impossible to get those channels on YouView on a Sony TV without having an aerial plugged in for the initial setup, which I know isn’t true, but I was thinking maybe I’d have to replace the aerial that I took down before it fell down in a storm a few years ago. Fortunately removing updates from the app seems to have restored it to a working version from simpler times, at least for now.

A busy week of running, with a track session on Wednesday on top of the usual Tuesday club training, plus the return of the TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten), trying to navigate round hordes of trick-or-treaters. Then an extremely slow parkrun, and the first of this season’s cross country fixtures on Sunday, at Framlingham.

It’s still unseasonably warm (or maybe this is the new normal, as we race towards inevitable extinction), although I have put the heating on briefly a couple of times.

Something something fiddling with clocks. Also how is it nearly November, and why is it so mild?

My feet have been a bit sore after Sunday, but still functional: I survived a harder than intended club training session on Tuesday, and a much gentler run for beer (finishing with beer and pizza at the Holbrook Swan) on Wednesday.

I discovered this week that text fragment URLs are a thing – follow the “Sunday” link in the previous paragraph for an example.

I took Friday off work, and finally made my Christmas cake (and the extra small one I somehow agreed to make for Nicola for the past few years).

Having said I’d recovered, parkrun was horrendous. I was late leaving home, and probably tired myself out just cycling up the hill to get there, then started several minutes behind the tail walker. I made my way past some of the slower runners, but was struggling to even maintain a glacial pace, with my heart rate through the roof. Fortunately I felt a bit better on Sunday, and went for a long slow run in the Fynn Valley with Holly, on a gloriously sunny day. We managed to accidentally both turn up in the same T-shirt, which must have looked odd to the people we passed – maybe they thought we’d got really lost and were still running the 2022 (?) Framlingham 10k.

I enjoyed Ludwig on iPlayer (or the BBC, as we used to call it), once I’d managed to suspend my disbelief that someone could walk into their twin brother’s job and no-one would notice. I’ve also started watching The Cleaner, which I’d somehow missed (I think I may have watched one episode of the first series), which is entertainingly bonkers.

I’ve still got a cold, but it’s definitely on its way out. I even ordered some LFTs and used one during the week to tell me it’s probably not Covid. These ones specifically say to swab less than an inch into your nostrils, which was kind of disappointing because I never used to tire of the surprise of just how far back into your head you can poke something (and the accompanying realisation that that old “hammer a nail into your nose” trick isn’t really a trick as such). I still used it (the cold, not the nail thing) as an excuse to work from home all week instead of going into the office though.

Having decided that I should probably use my Steam Deck for more than just playing the arcade version of Tetris on an emulator, I had a look round the Steam Store and found Gris on sale for something like £1.79, with a claim that it was like other games I’ve played (specifically Portal – I can’t remember the other one). It’s nothing like Portal, but it reminds me a bit of Limbo. I don’t know how far through it I am, but I’m enjoying it – it’s a nice peaceful game with beautiful design, and low-stress puzzles of sorts that you just kind of meander through, without any possibility of dying.

The weather’s warmed up a lot after last weekend’s cold snap. I ran for coffee on Thursday morning, and got home dripping in sweat despite not having run fast and just wearing shorts and T-shirt.

I did a bit of greyhound sitting on Friday and Saturday, but apart from giving her her lunch that basically just entailed being in the house while she slept.

Sunday was out club’s annual One Lap to Ultra event – six hours to complete as many 4.5 mile laps as you can (or want to), with everyone bringing in food for the stops in between. I managed seven laps (32 miles) again, but as usual the last couple were something of a slog. A few people did eight, and one lunatic managed a very impressive nine. It was pretty windy in places, but at least the forecast rain never amounted to anything more than a bit of drizzle.

Latest key-related incompetence: at work on Tuesday I noticed that my car key was still in my pocket from the weekend (I cycle to work, and don’t usually leave keys in pockets). I needed to use the car on Tuesday night, but figured I’d remember where it was. Then, predictably, I left my jeans in my locker when I got changed to cycle home, so had to get a lift to Felixstowe instead. Pretty sure this is a more-or-less exact repeat of an earlier anecdote … yup.

My latest fox visitor was here again on Friday morning, sleeping on a car roof. I gave him some breakfast, but he had to compete for it with Badger cat.

The BBC show Threads is on iPlayer at the moment, 40 years after its original broadcast. I didn’t watch it in the 80s (we didn’t have a TV) … I knew it was famously bleak, but wasn’t entirely prepared for how it just kept getting relentlessly bleaker. Fortunately the geopolitical situation now is perfectly stable and there’s absolutely no risk of conflict in the middle east or the former Soviet Union spiralling out of control.

I seem to have picked up a cold (or Covid, bird flu etc). The sore throat hit me as I tried to get to sleep on Friday night, and now it’s in the coughing and runny nose stage. I expected that to presage a sub-par performance in the Capel 5 on Sunday, but to my surprise I managed my third-best five mile time. I think the sudden onset of wintry temperatures must have helped.

It took me ages to figure out who one of the team captains (Charles Dundas) on the latest episode of Only Connect reminded me of, but eventually realised it was John Hodgman playing the “I’m a PC” guy from those old Apple ads.

I finally got round to replacing the tyres on the so-called Mini. They’d been popping up intermittently on the MOT as advisories for a while (according to the MOT history, before I bought the car). I paid about a quarter of the cost of the car for the four tyres plus fitting, but fortunately the car was very cheap! I was surprised how much the ride seemed to be improved, but maybe that was my imagination. The old ones still seemed to grip very well, so I’m not sure that has changed much.

I had my flu jab on Monday. No random free blood pressure test this year, and naturally I haven’t followed last year’s advice and made a GP appointment to get it checked properly (also I still need to get round to booking that over-40 health check that I was supposed to have 14 years ago).

I’ve been hearing fox-type noises most nights recently, and spotted a young-looking fox in the garden a couple of times, so I put some food out for him (or her). Not sure whether this one will take food out of my hand like the one that used to frequent the place a few years ago, but it’s fairly bold.

I went down to Totton at the weekend for Phil’s 60th (!) birthday, and was relieved to avoid the traffic nightmares of last time. We went to the pub on Friday night, then dragged Phil out for his annual parkrun at Bartley Park. We were a bit tight for time to walk down there, then discovered that part of the normal route is now unavailable so they’d moved the start, so we had to jog the last bit and arrived with seconds to spare for the start. I managed a half-decent time, finishing in the same 10th place as last time I ran that course (well technically a different course, as it’s gone from two to four laps thanks to a damaged bridge, which also caused the change of start position).

Phil had a party on Saturday night, which was a good chance to catch up with a bunch of people I hadn’t seen for varying amounts of time. In one case we suspected we hadn’t seen each other since I moved away to University in 1988, which feels simultaneously a terrifyingly long time ago and also very recent. A couple of people mentioned that they enjoyed my tales of incompetence on Facebook, and in one case that they missed these weeknotes since leaving Twitter. I reassured him that they were still happening, so hi Gaz if you’ve found your way to the blog!

The weather’s definitely getting more autumnal this week, and wetter. I seem to have been very lucky though – the forecast for Wednesday evening’s Run for Beer was a 95% chance of rain, but we stayed dry, and I just missed showers cycling to work and back on Thursday, then waited for a massive downpour before heading out for a fairly dry run (apart from the puddles). Leaving the house on Saturday morning for parkrun felt the coldest it’s been for a while, but as usual it quickly warmed up.

I finally got round to getting new tyres for the car at the weekend. I wasn’t expecting to notice any difference, but it does feel weirdly smoother. No doubt they’ll outlast the car.

On Sunday I did a fifteen mile “Reservoir Jogs” charity trail run, with three pub stops (plus the one at the end). We may have made a tiny navigational error early on that added a mile or so and saw us going the wrong way round Alton Water, but other than that all went well! Oh, apart from arriving in the first pub at 11.40 when they weren’t licensed to sell alcohol until 12, and having to make do with a coke instead of a pint.

Oh, and I made a tiny dent in the gardening backlog by removing a wheelie-bin’s worth of brambles from what I still laughingly call the lawn. The biggest one was about 15 ft long, and nearly half an inch thick at the big end.

We returned to the pub quiz at Hanks on Wednesday, despite having reservations about the new quizmaster. Sadly it wasn’t any better this time, and we didn’t even win! In fact we were second-to-last, although there were only five teams and only a few points between second and fourth places. We’re going to try a different venue next time.

One of the podcasts I subscribe to is Jokes with Mark Simmons, where Mark talks to another comedian about jokes they can’t get to work, and try to fix them. This week’s guest was Mark Wallace, and after they’d given up on one of the jokes, I was chuffed that they liked my suggestion ?

I had a couple of days off work, but didn’t get anything particularly useful done, as usual. I did spend some time finishing off the small library I’d accidentally ended up writing while shaving a yak related to my stalled attempt to work through GOOS in Elixir. Most of that time was spent on something I ended up removing after deciding it didn’t really add any value, but never mind.

I didn’t really expect the library to interest anyone, but before I’d even told anyone it existed one person stumbled across it and found it useful (and sent a PR)! I got a bit more feedback after announcing it on the Elixir Forum.

I didn’t run the Ipswich Half on Sunday, but did a half-marathon distance easy run with my camera, timed so I could stop after a few miles to support and photograph people coming out of Holywells Park, then headed over the Orwell Bridge, where I stopped again to get some shots looking down on the runners passing underneath. The photos are all on Facebook, but here’s one of the aerial shots.