Feels like I might be getting close to shaking off this runny nose and cough, a mere four weeks after contracting covid. The fatigue’s mostly gone too, but I have to say that if the expectation is that we’ll all get this a couple of times a year from now on that’s a pretty miserable prospect.
I think I’ve definitely narrowed the car issue down to the starter motor now. I didn’t risk driving it to Felixstowe on Tuesday night because it felt a bit reluctant to start again (there was a definite “strong–strong–strong–weak” rhythm to it turning over, which makes me suspect there’s a dodgy winding or contact somewhere). Fortunately I had time to get the train instead, which meant I got a few extra running miles in too. However, after a successful supermarket trip the next day and the purchase of a battery booster pack I just about summoned up the courage to drive it to Cambridge on Saturday night (for a much-delayed CoCo and the Butterfields show), but when I got in to drive home it did the dreaded click but don’t turn over thing. The booster was no help at all (as the battery presumably isn’t the problem), but by a stroke of luck I’d parked on a slight uphill, and there was a big empty space behind me. By putting it in reverse I was able to rock it enough to shake things up a bit, after which it worked OK, to my immense relief. Not sure I really want to use it again until I’ve fixed it now though, and to be honest it’s tempting just to replace it (it’s still virtually brand new by my standards – I find number plates with the letter at the beginning rather than the end a bit suspect, let alone these new fangled ones – but actually nearly 20 years old). Unfortunately that entails deciding what to replace it with – something small, cheap, economical, not too boring, reliable and maybe slightly more practical.
I’ve finally started getting my running volume back up again, after a few weeks where not only was the mileage very low, but a worrying percentage of it was races and other attempts to go quickly, with far too few easy miles. I don’t think I’ve got much chance to hit my original 2022 mile target for 2022 now, although 55 miles a week is theoretically doable (I managed something close to that for the last few months of 2020, to hit 2020, but there wasn’t much else going on then to get in the way). I’m seriously running out of time for my October hollow tree picture, so went out on Sunday looking for a suitable candidate. I found a couple, but didn’t realise until too late that the app I have on my phone that lets me trigger the camera from my headphones was misbehaving, so I hadn’t actually got any photos of myself (a normal person would have just asked the people who walked past while I was standing sheepishly in a tree to take one for me, rather than just sheepishly nodding hello).
I woke up on Sunday morning thinking “that’s odd – I feel like I’ve had a decent eight-hour sleep (bar the odd coughing episode), but it’s only been seven hours. Then I remembered that the clocks had changed. If we’d still been in the old world of having to do them all manually I expect I’d have made it through the day without noticing that I was out of step with the rest of the country.