Apparently it’s September now, which seems frankly unlikely.
Monday was of course a bank holiday (and a real one, not one of those Scotland or NI ones that pop up in the calendar to give false hope). Justin organised another of his handicap races from his house based on the parkrun substitutes he was doing during semi-lockdown, this time expanding the distance to seven miles. Having missed the chance of a Sunday long run thanks to the beer and bicycle shenanigans described last week, I decided to run there (four miles), potter gently round the seven, then after coffee and biscuits take a scenic route back through the countryside for a total of 17.
I got an email from my electricity and gas supplier, Ecotricity [side note: they do seem to be genuinely as environmentally-friendly as a power company can be, and their founder has an interesting back story, which I recently heard about on James OBrien’s podcast], plugging their mobile phone provider, Ecotalk. The prices seemed pretty good, and they use the same EE network that I’m already on, but I wasn’t sure whether it would be cheaper than the employee discount prices I was paying (EE of course being owned by BT, for complicated reasons involving deciding we didn’t want a mobile network, then oh wait, maybe we did). Turns out BT Mobile been ratcheting the price up over the years and (including a 15GB upgrade that I never use) I was now paying an outrageous £32/month. I’ve now foregone that “discount” and switched, and am now paying £12 a month. Go, as they say, figure.
Incidentally, I love the way sim cards are basically a history of shrinking phone sizes. Although annoyingly at some point phones all started getting bigger again, even if the sims didn’t.
Having reently put myself through rewatching the Star Wars prequels, I went to move on to the original trilogy, only to be unable to find the DVDs (I guess Jane took those and I hadn’t figured out which was the least bad version to repurchase). Having recently read about the “despecialised” versions, I did some digging and ended up downloading the Project 4k77 edition (plus 80 and 83 for Empire and Jedi). I wouldn’t steal a car or a handbag, but I reckon I’ve bought those movies enough times on various media over the years not to feel too bad about it. I’ve watched the first two so far, and it’s nice to finally get to see Han shooting first in HD at last (even if the odd scene is slightly grainy).
The racing season kicked off again on Sunday, with the Framlingham 10k. After a poor performance last year, and a worse one the year before, I managed to scrape a course PB of 44:13 today (my 2018, 2019 and 2023 times are all within five seconds of each other).
