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!