Author: Kerry Buckley

Amazingly, it’s been nearly a year since we gave up on the quiz at Hanks, and despite saying we’d find another one it’s taken until now to actually manage to organise it. We went to the Raven, which I don’t think I’ve ever been to, to see what theirs was like. Apparently it’s exactly the same as it was when Rachel did it about eight years ago, and is a Family Fortunes format, with 20 questions where you have to pick five answers, with a point for each one that’s in the top four that the 100 people (allegedly) answered, and a bonus point if you put the top answer first. I think we were third, but sadly there were only prizes for the top two. Also they were completely out of draught beer. Other than that an enjoyable evening though!

On Friday I went to Boots for my flu jab (paid for by work). The pharmacist told me (again) that my blood pressure was too high, but this time was quite insistent that I get a follow-up check (no doubt because they get paid by the NHS to administer it!). I think the deal is that I go in first thing in the morning to get a monitor that I wear for the day, although I’m not 100% sure. she wanted me to go in at 9am on Saturday, but as any fool knows that’s parkrun time. I’m going in on Monday instead – I’m not quite sure why they were acting as though it’s urgent (please enjoy the irony if I collapse today with a heart attack or stroke).

Speaking of parkrun, the side-effects of the jab (which I usually barely notice) really kicked in on Saturday, and after a slow jog down to the park it was all I could do to drag myself round in my eight-slowest-ever time. Fortunately the traditional post-run large ’spoons breakfast and a pint of Jaipur gave me enough energy to jog home back up the hill. Mostly recovered by Sunday though, so I took myself out for a slow 14-mile loop down the river to Levington and back via Nacton and Foxhall.

Forgot to mention last week that after putting up with the appalling battery life of my Pixel 6a after the mandatory update to stop it catching fire or whatever, I finally decided to upgrade to a Pixel 9a. Other than the battery thing, there wasn’t much wrong with the old one, despite it being three years old, but the free battery replacement option would have entailed a trip to Cambridge or London, and the price of the 9a had already dropped by £100, so I ended up taking the £150 off which basically meant it was half list price. As is the way with phones these days it’s not a huge leap forward, but the battery life is way better (I generally use about 40% battery in a full day, whereas the old one needed charging by early evening). The screen’s much brighter too, which is nice in sunlight.

I managed to fit a quick cut of my increasingly scruffy hedge between the showers on Saturday, which is hopefully that job done for the year, and just all the other jobs remaining.

I’d been getting increasingly worse results from my pizza oven lately, with it struggling to get to a decent temperature, and taking far too long to cook. This weekend I noticed that the chimney vent had somehow ended up closed, and after opening it the oven quickly heated up to 400°C and was back to cooking a pizza in 90 seconds again.

After last week’s ten mile warmup, this Sunday was the Ipswich Half, which it turns out I haven’t done since 2019 (when it was the Great East Run). It’s the biggest local race, with around 2,700 runners this year, round closed roads in the town centre and out to Freston, with a couple of biggish (for Suffolk) hills. I went in thinking 1:35 would be nice but unrealistic, and anything under 1:40 would be OK, and ended up pretty much in the middle with 1:37:22, which is faster than I managed in 2017, 18 or 19. That put me in 296th place, so not quite top 10%! I had Holly and Maria to run with again this week, and as usual we each somehow relied on the other two to maintain our pace. Holly broke away in the last mile and finished about ten seconds ahead, and I just about kept in front of Maria in a race to the line (although she’s somehow currently still missing from the results).

Naturally a lot of us ended up in the “clubhouse” afterwards, then all went home for showers and coffee before most of us returned for the evening.

Definitely a more autumnal feel to the weather this week. I managed to miss the worst of most of the thunderstorms, but did get soaked a couple of times.

The management shift directly above me at work has been finalised at last, after about a year of machinations. Rupert’s demoted himself so he can finish his career back in a more hands-on technical role, and Anders (who’s already in the team) is taking over. Apparently there was one other candidate, but we don’t know who – it’s almost certainly better that we’ve got someone internal who isn’t likely to start randomly changing things just to make a mark. This of course increases the number of the regulars at the monthly Fat Cat ex-colleague meet-ups that I’ve worked for by one.

An outrageous three consecutive days with no running after Tuesday night, in preparation for the Coastal 10 on Sunday (obviously I did parkrun on Saturday too, albeit very slowly). As I have for the past two years, I went down to Felixstowe on Saturday afternoon to help put out the signs ready for the race. We’d done all but one mostly in the dry, then got hit by a downpour putting out the mile three marker on the prom.

The race itself went acceptably well, helped by unusually good weather conditions (last year it was blowing a gale, and in 2023 it was ridiculously hot), but hindered by the fact that all my races since the marathon have been 10k or under, so 10 miles was a bit of a shock to the system (trying not to think of next weekend’s 13.1 …). No Holly or Maria to form our normal little peloton this year either, as they were both marshalling.

We thought there was a plan for a bit of a club social after the race, but there seems to have been a bit of a breakdown in communication and no-one was told, and The Hut was locked up once they’d finished using it for organising the marshals. We ended up sitting in one of the shelters on the prom instead (not even facing the sea!), then braved the rain in the evening to go back out for some dinner and a few beers in the Cricketers.

I took a random week off work, and managed to accomplish at least some useful things …

First of all, I finally finished running a new hot water pipe to replace the one that leaked under the floor. It looks a bit odd running round the utility room door, but I couldn’t really come up with a better route. I didn’t set anything on fire, and there don’t appear to be any leaks!

Unfortunately, when I turned the boiler back on (before finishing the plumbing, but after isolating the burst pipe), the boiler started misbehaving. It heats the water up fine, but when I turn the tap off the boiler keeps running – the actuator from the diverter valve isn’t going back in again and the microswitch stays on. Not sure whether it’s just sticking or the diaphragm’s gone again, but unfortunately it’s impossible to get at it without removing a bunch or other bits, and I think given the boiler was fitted in 2004 I should probably accept that it’s had a good innings and get a new, more efficient one fitted.

On Monday we had the return leg of the “A14 Track Challenge” in Bury St Edmunds, after the Ipswich version in June. It’s basically a 5000m race between four local clubs, with three races for people running at different paces. I was in the middle (19–23 minute) race, and despite not feeling great beforehand managed to scrape under 21 minutes for the first time in a while. A bunch of us took our bikes on the train to get there, then decamped to the Corn Exchange (one of the fancier Wetherspoons pubs). Thanks to the lure of beer at £1.79 a pint we ended up staying until the last train, finally arriving back in Ipswich after midnight.

The Tour of Britain had two stages in Suffolk this year. I didn’t join the people who cycled out to Woodbridge Snape to see them on Tuesday, but I did nip out to watch them come through the imaginary village of Culpho.

There was also a plan to ride out to Stowmarket to see them again on Wednesday, but the weather looked so awful that we ended up going by train instead. Basically the day involved hanging around for a bit to see the start, decamping to the Willow Tree for a few hours, coming out to watch them come back in near the end, then nipping back in for a couple more beers. Then the train got me back just in time to go back out to the Fat Cat for the monthly ex-colleague meet-up.

This weekend finally saw the return of Sunday racing after the summer, with the Framlingham 10k. It was warm, hilly and hard work, but I somehow managed to finish slightly quicker than last year’s admittedly poor performance.

Any hope of getting round to cutting the hedge on Sunday afternoon evaporated with the news that Robin & Jo were heading to the Fat Cat. By the end of the afternoon we’d been joined by Courtney, then Dave and Sally (and Fizz the dog), and finally Neil & Gillian. Eventually the lack of food got to us, and we decamped to the Harpers’ via the chip shop at the end of their road.

I think if I’m going to ever get quicker again and not become a massive fat man I’m going to have to hope there aren’t too many weeks where the running/drinking ratio is tilted that far toward the latter!

I forgot to mention last week that, after about 18 months, Casper has finally figured out how to use the cat flap! Just in time to get a bit more use out of the garden before autumn arrives and the house seems more appealing – even Ninja has come in and purred on my lap a couple of times in the past couple of days, after spending almost every minute of the summer hiding outside as usual.

It was the last bank holiday for a while on Monday, but I did very little other than recover from the cycling and drinking on Sunday. Onwards to Christmas.

I still felt worn out by Tuesday evening, so drove to Felixstowe for training for a change, rather than cycling. Even without the extra miles on the bike the running wore me out even more, but after another couple of rest days (apart from riding to work) I managed to drag myself out of bed for Friday’s Run for Coffee. Only two of us running this week for some reason, although a few others joined us at the coffee shop. Then a slowish parkrun on Saturday on what’s still a horrible course (I heard someone describe the uphill bit as “barbaric”, which seems about right). And yet another ’Spoons breakfast.

On Saturday my neighbour popped round to say that the lady whose garden backs onto both of ours was concerned about a plant that’s growing in my hedge. Apparently it’s called a black locust tree, and grows quite aggressively and quite large. He offered to cut it down and put it in his brown bin, but I felt guilty so did it myself on Sunday (as well as also removing another smaller one I found a bit further along). I’ve got next week off, and cutting the hedge is on my notional to-do list, so we’ll see whether I actually get round to it.

After however many weeks it’s been with no hot water, and no success with my half-hearted efforts to find a plumber who wasn’t booked up for months, I’d decided to fit a new pipe myself. I think I’ve now assembled all the bits and pieces I need, and made a start this weekend. I need to cut the old pipe off in the utility room, then run a new one through the wall, over the door and under the sink (completely bypassing the leaky one under the floor), and it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to put an isolator valve before my new pipework in case anything sprung a leak. Then (very belatedly) I realised that with basically half an hour’s work cutting the pipe and putting the isolator on I could now turn the water back on at the boiler and have hot water everywhere except the kitchen. A shame I didn’t think of that earlier, but on the plus side I’ve got quite used to cold showers, which I hear are quite trendy.

I always forget just how much better SDS+ drills are than normal ones. The only 15mm bit I had that I thought was long enough to go through the wall was one with a normal round shank, so I spent ages with a hammer drill making about a quarter-inch dent in the breeze block wall. I eventually decided to save some time by drilling as far as I could with the SDS+ and a short bit, then reverting to the normal one for the remainder. It turned out it was just about long enough after all, and flew through the wall in about two seconds, almost literally like a hot knife through butter.

I’ve now got as far as cutting and dry-fitting the pipes on the utility room side (behind the washing machine), so just the actual kitchen bit and all the soldering to go.

I noticed that Point Break (the original one, not the 2015 remake) was on iPlayer. I missed it at the cinema when a bunch of friends went without me 30-odd years ago, but on balance I think I’m probably with Bill, who said at the time that it was rubbish, even though everyone else had enjoyed it.

Another track session on Wednesday. This time it was split between 100m all-out efforts with 100m recoveries (which I walked), and the same but 200m. I’d remembered to take the lights off my other bike from Tuesday’s ride to Felixstowe and put them in my bag, but had inexplicably (well, explained only by my usual incompetence) forgotten to also take their brackets, so I had to nip home via cycle paths and quiet roads to grab them before heading to the pub. It was one of those “just gone off” days, with Dave and I between us having I think four different beers that we’d ordered on the app but turned out to no longer be available.

On Sunday it was time for what’s become the annual ride out to the Lindsey Rose for their beer festival, with ten of us this year – double the number from two years ago. It was a nice day for it, and would have been uneventful other than for a few people deciding that the lack of the sumo suits that were there the first year was no obstacle to doing some wrestling anyway. This somehow ended up with Peter getting carted off to A&E with a broken ankle.

Lots of people seem to be leaving Github lately, after some management changes or something (I seem to remember similar rumblings when Microsoft bought them, but I don’t think they ever came to much). I have loads of random repos on there, but hardly use any of the site’s features, and I’d be reluctant to leave, as I was almost one of the first thousand people to sign up (user ID 1194), which puts me in the earliest 0.001% of users.

Wednesday was FRR’s annual Two Rivers handicap race/social – starting off at Landguard Fort in reverse order of speed, picking our own routes (not that there are a huge number of sane options) and converging at Felixstowe Ferry about five miles later. It was hot and hard work, and I fell behind the people that started around the same time as me, and got overtaken by most of the faster ones. I still managed to pick off a few of the runners who started before me though. Then to the pub, naturally.

I heard a noise outside on Thursday night that sounded exactly like one of those squeaky toys for dogs. On investigation it turned out to be a frog, which was a source of fascination for the cats. After failing several times when it hopped out of my grasp, I finally managed to catch it and put it over in the corner of the garden where there may or may not be the remains of a water feature.

A rare weekend away, heading back to Totton for Tim’s birthday barbecue. It was good to see lots of old friends, and to stop off and take my dad out for lunch on the way home on Sunday (although we ended up being subjected to the Saints–Ipswich game on the pub TV!). I did Bartley Park parkrun while I was down there, and managed my highest-ever finishing position of 7th (albeit only out of 124).

After adding my parkrun result to my spreadsheet (what, don’t you all have a parkrun results spreadsheet?) I spent altogether too long trying to work out why conditional formatting in a column was colouring rows that it shouldn’t have. After I deleted the rule and the colour didn’t go away, I eventually realised that some previous copying and pasting had somehow brought the colour with it. In my defence, that feels like a bug, and at best another example of why “paste as plain text” should be the default everywhere.

The monster change I’ve been working on on and off at work has finally been merged, and apart from a couple of minor issues seems to be working OK. Basically the system runs about 2,500 different checks against a bunch of different bits of the mobile network (which are mostly just Linux virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters), and each of those checks used to be handled by a specific module, with functions to return the name, description, which type of node to run on, etc. This made sense initially, but as the number of node types we support and the number of tasks we run grew, there were an increasing number that were virtually the same, which led to a lot of delegation to common modules. The new version moves most of this metadata to configuration for each task, with a field pointing to the implementing module. Although initially the modules are the same (with a bunch of functions removed), we can now start collapsing the similar/identical ones, with multiple tasks pointing to the same implementation.

There are also quite a few other tools within the system that refer to tasks, and all those (and all the tests) needed changing to use the task reference instead of the module (although fortunately the way we were serialising the module name to the database meant that that could become the reference so there was no big data migration required). It ended up touching over 6,000 files, and changing in the order of 100,000 lines of code (in a 400,000-line codebase), and took a fair bit of ingenuity with shell scripts, vim macros, AST rewriting and random bits of grep/sed/awk magic to do as much of the donkey work as possible. I’m glad it’s done!

Another current/ex colleague Fat Cat meetup on Wednesday, this time adding Dave, another of my former bosses. We had a good rambling conversation covering all sorts of weird things, much like the old Friday Pub days.

I’d ordered a Pet Needs T-shirt on Bandcamp Friday (not because I need any more T-shirts, but because it’s a good way to support the band) and it arrived with a giant Post-It note on which front man Johnny had scrawled “Cheers Kerry!” with a signature, which was a nice touch.

On Saturday evening I rode out to Brantham again – fortunately not to run five miles again, but rather to have a few beers and congratulate/laugh at the mad fools finishing the SVP100 and 50.

My Sunday long run was short by comparison to that, and on my own this week, with a loop out through Witnesham and Grundisburgh. This took me through not one but two “bull in field” sections, but on the plus side while skirting round the edge of one of them to give the cattle a wide berth I spotted a kingfisher by the stream (I think this is only the second time I’ve ever seen one; the first being in the 1970s!).

The two young foxes are still visiting now and again, although it’s probably about the time when they’ll be heading out to find their own territories. Here’s one of them doing a big old yawn to show that he’s not bothered by the cats that were lounging around nearby.

Classic British summer weather now the schools have broken up, with a fair amount of rain spread across the week. Somehow it seems to have all fallen while I was at home, and it’s been dry whenever I was outside. This surely can’t last.

Tuesday night’s club session was what’s become the annual Slow Paul birthday party, with us all running cross-country-style hilly laps of a course marked out in his field, before recovering with beer, hog roast and cake.

On Wednesday the team from work had another volunteering day, this time at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life) at Stowmarket. The weather forecast was good, so I decided to give my new bike a proper debut and cycle there (15 miles) and back (16 miles, because there was a very strange road junction that funnelled me to the A14 roundabout so I ended up coming back a different, more scenic, but slightly hillier route). The bike behaved itself, and it took me just over an hour in each direction.

The morning’s volunteering involved clearing undergrowth from a patch of ground on the edge of the site ground and laying bark chips round hedging plants. Then we walked down to the Willow Tree for lunch, before returning to sand down the Settling House (a 19th century auctioneer’s hut from Bury St Edmunds) ready for it to be painted. We also got a chance to see some lambs, piglets, goats and Suffolk Punch horses being fed.

I got back just in time to hop back on my other bike and nip down to Kesgrave to give blood (I’d carefully picked a donation session halfway home from work at 5.30pm, which would have turned out better had I been in the office). That went smoothly (armful number 65), but by the time I’d got home and made dinner I was wiped out!

I’d recovered the use of my legs well enough to join Friday morning’s Run for Coffee, then surprised myself by taking another minute and a half off my time on the new Christchurch Park parkrun course. I even managed to do a small amount of gardening on Saturday afternoon, although I think things are still growing several times more quickly than I’m cutting them back.

Sunday was long run day again, with an 18 mile loop up the Gipping Path to Claydon, then back via Akenham and Westerfield. That stupid new giant footbridge over the railway at Westerfield is still closed, but Plotaroute has sudddenly started routing over it again and the footpath diversion sign that used to be on the approaching path has gone, so once again we got right up to it before realising we had to turn back. Someone had leant a pallet against the fence to climb over, but the prospect of piercing my foot on a spike didn’t appeal. At that point we were both feeling worn out, and pretty much out of water, so we were “forced” to stop at the Railway for a pint (although only of lime and soda in Holly’s case) to refresh ourselves for the final three miles.

Still no hot water. I’m getting used to it, to be honest – even attempting these cold showers that seem to be so trendy these days. Additional delay caused by a couple of days’ back-and-forth with the person who was recommended to do the plumbing, only to eventually discover that he’s a heating engineer and doesn’t really do that kind of stuff. He recommended someone who is a plumber, but who is yet to get back to my message. Obviously this could all have been accomplished much quicker with phone calls, but that’s only for dire emergencies.

I bought a mildly-damaged but working customer-returned dehumidifier from eBay, and have had it running continuously while trying to keep the kitchen as closed off as possible while still letting the cats get to the flap and their food. Unusually, it has the water tank on the top, fed via a pump that comes on when (I assume) a small internal tank is full. This means that by simply adding a length of aquarium air hose it sends the water straight into the sink so no need to keep emptying it. It’s keeping the kitchen at around 35% humidity (and warm), so hopefully the damp’s slowly being drawn out of the floor.

Wednesday was FRR’s Run Bike Run event, a club social in Felixstowe that involves running about 1.5 miles, riding 6, then running another 2.5 (with the catch that there’s a cutoff time, and the “winner” is the last person to start that gets in in time). Then we all sat around for a bit eating sine excellent veggie chilli courtesy of Nicola and Sally, and I drank the beers I’d brought with me. As usual, I made life difficult for myself by cycling there and back from Ipswich, so once you add in my commute to work I ended up riding nearly 40 miles by the end of the day.

With the long string of Friday races finally having come to an end, and in fact nothing really happening until September, I didn’t really have an excuse to take it easy at parkrun this week. The plan was to just go a bit quicker though, as we’re still only five weeks into the new Christchurch Park event, so I can keep getting course PBs for a while. Unfortunately I’d put the wrong numbers into my spreadsheet, and convinced myself I needed to beat an average pace of 7:54/mile. I succeeded, but it felt tougher than it seemed like it should, given that I’d basically jogged round the previous four times. It turned out I’d actually gone about 2½ minutes quicker. Oops.

On Sunday I went for a long slow run round a loop out to the imaginary local village of Culpho with Holly, then as it stayed dry I finally took my new bike out for a quick spin. Surprisingly to no-one, it turns out that a carbon bike with fancy gears is significantly quicker than the fixed gear gravel bike that I’ve been pretty much exclusively using for years! I rode about 8 miles, mostly on country lanes, in half an hour without incident.

According to the scramble/timer app on my phone, I’ve now solved my puzzle cube (not technically a Rubik’s Cube because that’s a trademark) over 5,000 times. I’m sure this is perfectly fine and normal. I’ve also discovered that I struggle to solve anything other than a speed cube (I got a comically tiny one for a couple of quid from AliExpress, and can’t do it at all), because I rely on muscle memory and my hands completely fail to have any idea what to do if they get slowed down.