Kerry Buckley

Happy New Year, although it already feels like the Doomsday Clock hands are due another clockwise shift.

Bin news update: I discovered that the council had done a double whammy on me with the brown bin – not only did I miss the latest collection because it was a day early, but next time they’re only doing black bins, so it’ll be a whole month between me feeling pleased with myself for filling the bins up early and them actually getting emptied (assuming of course that I remember to put them out at the next opportunity).

I was a bit apprehensive when a dashboard warning came on last week to tell me that one of my sidelight bulbs had gone, having heard tales of light access on modern cars being a nightmare. As it turned out, I paid less than fiver for two bulbs, and it was a five-minute job with no tools required (would have been two minutes if I hadn’t misremembered which one was blown and replaced the working one first). I guess this is largely down to the fact that an 18-year-old car isn’t actually “modern”.

On New Year’s Eve, as usual, I joined a few fellow idiots to cycle to Felixstowe, run up and down the prom a bit, then go for a brief dip in the sea before returning home via a couple of pubs. It was a nice sunny day this year, albeit a bit chilly in the wind. I managed about a minute’s swimming this year, rather than the usual “shoulders underwater and one stroke” minimum – perhaps all those cold showers when I had no heating in the summer have toughened me up a bit!

I fired up the pizza oven in the garden for the first time in a few weeks, and almost immediately a friendly fox turned up (I always imagine it’s the same fox visiting, but it’s clearly not – for a start sometimes there are two). He (/she/they) didn’t hang around for pizza, but I did have some dog food to give him this time (last time I’d run out, and he followed me round looking disapproving).

Two parkruns again this week (New Year’s Day and the normal Saturday one). Both at Kesgrave because of ice on the paths at Christchurch Park, and I put a bit of actual effort into the second one, for a fair-to-mediocre time.

The cold snap continued through the weekend, but at least the wind had died down for my long run on Sunday, and there were lots of places where the trails would have been muddy if they weren’t frozen, so we avoided wet feet.

I did a bit more fiddling with my Neovim setup – it seems to be all sorted for Elixir development now, with very little custom config required. Not that I actually wrote any code during my fortnight off (or did pretty much anything else useful!), so we’ll see when I get back to work on Monday.

I finished playing Superliminal. It was OK, and original, but it’s no Portal.

I finished my Christmas pudding on Sunday, along with the last of the pot of cream that I opened on Christmas day, and which was labelled as use by 28 December, and eat within three days of opening. It was perfectly fine of course – there must be huge amounts of food getting chucked away for no reason because people are slaves to these dates (consider this ammunition for mocking me if next week it turns out I have food poisoning).

Finished the week with a curry at the Bangla, to celebrate Jo’s birthday.

Remember how last week I was feeling smug about the fact that I’d filled the brown bins up at the weekend, rather than at the last minute on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning as usual? Of course what I hadn’t done was check the Christmas schedule, so I failed to put them out before they came to collect them on Tuesday morning.

I got an email from the blood people saying they had some last-minute appointments available, so I went and gave my 66th (nearly an) armful on Tuesday. It was surprisingly busy for the time of year, but once I got into the chair the blood flowed out nice and quickly.

On Christmas Eve, as usual, I did the annual Stutton and Holbrook Fun Run (this year renamed to the “Stutton and Holbrook at RHS Fun Race”), in aid of Suffolk Mind. It was ridiculously windy, which made it quite cold, and because the wind was in the opposite direction to usual it meant a headwind on the normally fast downhill bit of the lap. I was another half minute slower than last year, but I’ll blame it on a lack of blood!

Obviously Christmas Day kicked off with parkrun, on a gloriously sunny (if a bit chilly and still windy) day. I switched plans at the last minute to head to Kesgrave, as that’s where most of my friends who were running had decided to be, but as I was running habitually late that meant a mildly frenzied ride into the wind to get there (and it’s about three miles, as opposed to half that to my normal venue). Fortunately they started about ten minutes late.

I spent the rest of the morning chopping bits out of a worn-out felt Santa suit and pinning them together to make a small hat that I could attempt to put on a cat for a Christmas photo. Badger was the most stoical about ignoring it.

I made myself the usual excessively large Christmas dinner. Despite this obviously only happening once a year I seem to have internalised it to the point that I can have all the components ready at the right time without having to faff around with all the lists and timers that I used to rely on.

I even forced down a slice of my Christmas pudding afterwards – it hadn’t turned out at all badly, even if I say so myself.

Saturday started with yet another parkrun – the last one of the year, so now I’ve successfully ticked off all 54 in 2025. The post-run Spoons visit was back on the agenda, and me having come out without money, cards or phone was not considered an obstacle to joining in. While everyone else was eating their breakfasts, Dave (who is a bad influence) bought us each two pints. This meant that having only had one beer on each of Christmas and Boxing Days, I’d managed to double that before lunchtime on Saturday.

I thought I’d have a play with NeoVim/LazyVim. It’s clearly shinier and no doubt more powerful than my usual lightly-configured Vim8, and most things worked as expected out of the box, but there are a couple of plugins I haven’t managed to get set up right yet, and I think I’m going to have to relearn some muscle memory to get back to the same level of effectiveness.

I belatedly discovered the excellent Inside, and played through it in a couple of days. I’m sure I’ve searched for “games like Limbo” plenty of times in the past, so I’m not sure how I missed it. I’ve also dipped into Silt and Superliminal, but I’m not 100% sold on either yet.

In what seems like a bizarre coincidence but is probably just an example of the frequency illusion/Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I watched an episode of Columbo where he was running around looking for a “Shriner” for some reason (something to do with a ring), and I was wondering what on earth one of them was – I was sure I’d never even heard the word before. Then I immediately watched Die Hard 2 (I’d seen the first one on Christmas Eve), only for the airport cop guy to shout that “everybody from the Shriners convention to the goddamn boy scouts” was passing through the airport.

Another long run on Sunday, on the same trail route out to Witnesham that we’d done in October. Last time we’d encountered a length of pipe in a field and idly wondered whether either of us would fit inside, and this time we felt that we couldn’t pass by without finding out. The answer was “not really”.

This is a weird one, but I seem to have found a miracle cure for the knee pain (IT band, I assume) that’s been plaguing me since One Lap to Ultra back in October. The pain had been coming and going, but it definitely still wasn’t right, despite getting some amount of rest while I was ill. I could hardly walk after the Turkey Trot the other week, and after last Sunday’s run it was pretty sore. Anyway, on Monday I spent about 40 minutes riding relatively hard on my new indoor bike trainer, and since then I haven’t felt even a tiny twinge of discomfort, despite running 9, 8 and 18 miles respectively on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The fan I was using to try to keep myself cool with did self-destruct while I was riding though, which made me briefly panic and hit the brakes, which obviously wouldn’t have done anything even if the big bang and bits of flying plastic had been anything to do with the bike.

Thursday was the annual Christmas pub run with the TTT crowd. This year we ran into town, then used a wheel of fortune type app to randomly select five pubs to run to (out of a choice of seven, although one of them turned out to have closed down) and which order to run to them.

I finished work for two weeks on Friday, which will be nice, assuming I manage not to get ill this time.

On Sunday I actually remembered to chop up another load of the cut-down laurel from months ago and put it in the brown bins ready for them to be collected on Wednesday. Certainly more pleasant than doing it in the dark on Tuesday night or having to get up early to do it on Wednesday morning (although of course this week I’ve got all day Monday and Tuesday to do it). The laurel’s pretty much gone now, but there’s still a big pile of branches from the apple tree, and quite a jungle of brambles to clear. And I still haven’t started putting the greenhouse up in the space I cleared (the bit I dug out to lay the slabs in is now full of weeds).

I braved the supermarket on Sunday for Christmas food (but mainly because I needed normal food too). Despite leaving it until just before they closed it was still pretty rammed, but at least it was Waitrose so everyone was polite. That gives me a few days to figure out what I’ve forgotten. I’ve marzippanned the cakes too, and realised that one advantage of making marzipan instead of buying it is that it uses egg yolks, which handily leaves whites for the icing.

Some poor quality control from the Britannia app’s Revealed puzzle on Saturday. I guessed correctly with no hints, but the letter count didn’t fit so I assumed I must have got it wrong ?

I finally managed to come up with a working solution to day three part two of Advent of Code, then got through four, five and six without too much trouble. On the second half of day seven, it was easy enough to get something that worked with the small example from the instructions, but when I fed it the real input it just sat there. I left it running, because it was time to head out to …

… the monthly random ex-colleague meet-up at the Fat Cat. Just me, Tony and Mel this time, with at least two people opting to be at Portman Road watching the football instead.

When I got home the Advent of Code thing was still silently churning away, and when it still hadn’t produced an answer by the morning I put it out of its misery. No idea how far through it had got, but I was surprised it hadn’t run out of memory. I started from scratch at lunchtime, replacing the recursive tree-walking nightmare with something that just worked through the list once with a fancy accumulator, in a tail-call-optimisable way. It promptly spat out the correct result in 0.02 seconds, which just goes to show that while premature optimisation may indeed be the root of all evil, when you need to consider performance sometimes you really need to consider performance.

On Friday we had the Felixstowe Road Runners Christmas run/quiz/pub crawl. We had more than the allowed number of people for a team, so decided to avoid the risk of disqualification by not actually getting any points – basically failing to visit any of the pubs on the list, or to answer any questions or do any bonus activities. We ran out to Walton to check out the newly-reopened Half Moon, ended up staying there for three pints, but missed hearing the folk band who were setting up as we left. Then we headed to the other side of town to the Dooley for one more. At that point Jason got a message saying we were late back (which we somehow always manage to be), and that the 9pm time on the instructions was wrong and should have been 8.15. This led to a pacier than expected couple of miles back to Broadway House for our bangers and mash.

Designated driver (for the six Ipswich-based folks) Neil was detouring through Chantry to drop Ryan off on his side of town, at which point Ryan insisted that we all had to stop at his local, the Kingfisher, where he’d buy us all a final round.

On Saturday I did a bit of routine maintenance on my “normal” bike, including replacing the chunky rubber with 28mm road tyres (I’m sure I ordered 32mm, but that’s the risk of buying stuff off AliExpress I guess), which allowed me to put the mudguards that I took off in 2021 back on. I’m looking forward to arriving at work with a dry bum next time it rains.

Now it seems I’ve finally recovered from my cold, and my dodgy knee (IT band?) isn’t too bad, I did my first long slow Sunday run for a while (only 17 weeks to the marathon!). I met Holly in Christchurch Park and we did a 10-ish mile loop out through Tuddenham, Culpho and Playford, making it about 13.5 altogether. The weather was sunny and milder than expected, but there were quite a few cars on the roads, which mostly don’t have pavements. Our fault for being too lazy to get out earlier I guess. I’d been organised and made a ball of pizza dough beforehand, so that had risen ready for lunch when I got back (after turning it into an actual pizza, obviously).

I don’t want to speak too soon, but I think I might finally be coming out the other side of this never-ending cold.

Advent of Code started this week. There are only going to be 12 challenges this year, but after finishing the first two on the days they came out I stalled slightly on day three part two. It’s now the 7th, which doesn’t bode well.

Much consternation at work over the latest npm supply chain attack, but I’m not aware of any actual infections yet. I did discover in the process that npm install by default ignores versions in your package-lock.json for transitive dependencies, and just installs the latest acceptable version. To get what in a sane world would be the default behaviour you have to run npm ci.

In a bizarre “are we sure this isn’t a simulation” coincidence, I was walking back to my desk with a complicated train of thought including pondering different people’s preferences relating to hugging/being hugged. Back at my computer, I found a newly-arrived Now I Know newsletter describing Mensa’s red/green/yellow badge dot system for addressing exactly this issue at conferences.

On Thursday we had our work Christmas meal. An escape room (Christmas Catastrophe), followed by food at The Forge and a couple of pints at The Nelson.

Alice, who organised things this year, had provided some extra bits on the table along with the crackers, and I got a two-and-a-half-inch Christmas tree to assemble out of 147 miniature Lego-like bricks. I put it together on Friday evening – it was very fiddly and took a surprisingly long time. I even had to supplement my reading glasses with a loupe to be able to see the lines between pieces on the equally tiny instructions.

Sunday saw the return of the Beccles Turkey Trot. Despite the name, this is a proper 10 mile road race, which last took place in 2019. We’d all kind of assumed that it wasn’t coming back, but we were wrong! For the first time in about a month, I had a half-decent run, finishing quicker than six years ago, and about eight minutes faster than my dreadful showing at the Hadleigh 10 a couple of weeks ago. Nothing much has changed about the event, and as is traditional they still handed out Christmas puddings at the finish. Although that does mean that, along with the one I made a couple of days before learning that the race had returned, I now have about eight servings of the stuff to get through.

I’m still struggling to shake off this cold, although it feels like I might finally be nearing the end of it.

On Tuesday, my first day back in the office since a week off, it turned out I hadn’t quite reset my body clock. I woke up at about 5.30, decided that was far too early (which it was), then the next thing I knew it was 7.45. I made myself even later than I otherwise would have been by still making sandwiches and a coffee for lunch, then realised halfway in that I’d left them at home.

Wednesday was another monthly track night, which was an excuse to take it easy at the normal Tuesday night road session. And then having run on Tuesday was an excuse to take it easy on the track (in reality my cold was an excuse for both). After the track Neil, Dave and I headed for the traditional post-run ’Spoons visit (Dave having missed the actual running, but turned up in time for the important bit). They were doing Abbot Reserve (6.5% abv) for £2.25 a pint (cheaper than bottles in Waitrose), so it would have been rude not to hang around for a few.

On Thursday we had a work pub lunch at the Fox to celebrate Oli and Leon having graduated. I’d forgotten about it in the morning, so still made sandwiches (and naturally remembered to take them in this time), so ended up eating my lunch for tea for the second time this week.

The hills of parkrun put paid any idea that I might be returning to full health, with a very slow time still being a struggle when I was theoretically taking it easy. Then Woodbridge cross country on Sunday, where I abandoned any attempt at speed and plodded round five minutes slower than last year. No swimming this time, at least.

I recently watched all the episodes of Police Squad for the first time in decades, followed by the three Naked Gun films. The series was as excellent as ever, but the first film was mildly disappointing (I remembered a lot of the scenes but very little of the plot), and the two sequels were dreadful. I didn’t remember anything from them at all, although I would have sworn that I’d seen them at some point. Anyway, I rectified matters by buying the Columbo box set, which will keep me occupied for a while. It’s shocking how old-fashioned the world of the early episodes is, given that it’s (just) within my lifetime. It’s almost like I’m old or something.

As predicted, my cold (flu?) kept me pretty much wiped out for my entire week off, so I was even lazier than usual, barely left the house and didn’t run from Sunday to Friday.

Inspired by the lack of an anagram helper in the new Everyman crossword, and the fact that the Android app I wrote in 2012 is no longer supported, I wrote a very simple html/js/css app to fill the gap. With not a framework in sight, it weighs in at 152kB, works 100% offline and can be used or installed as a PWA from shuffle.kerryb.org.

I wasn’t too ill to drag myself slowly round parkrun on Saturday, and in the afternoon had a short and probably ill-advised first go on the indoor bike trainer that I’d bought last week, now all the various bits and pieces I needed to get it set up had also arrived. I connected it up to MyWhoosh (the cheapskate’s version of Zwift) and picked a random route, which ended up being 7.5km (I didn’t think to find out how to set it to miles before I started). I should probably clear some space to set it up in the garage with my old TV, because even that short session was extremely sweaty in the house!

The next “am I starting to beat this cold yet?” challenge was the Hadleigh 10 on Sunday. I started the race at what turned out to be a wildly optimistic pace, keeping up with Holly and Maria for the first mile, then the wheels progressively came off and for most of it I felt like I was just jogging along to make it to the finish. In my head it felt like the worst race I’ve ever done, but I reminded myself for perspective that ten years ago I ran it for the first time and was elated to finish nearly ten minutes slower than this year’s time. It was still pretty terrible though. The race organisers have clearly gone through all their old records, because this year they had pin badges for people who’d completed the event ten times or more. A few people got theirs beforehand, but I had to wait until afterwards because this was my tenth (eight 10s and two 5s) and they clearly weren’t going to assume I’d finish!

On Sunday evening a few of us headed to the Cricketers for a quiet drink, which somehow ended up with us being possibly the last to leave the pub, at around midnight.

My last week at work before a long-overdue week off, so naturally I’ve come down with some kind of lurgi. Probably not Covid (I did a test, which may have been out of date), but not sure whether it’s a mild flu or just a bad cold (probably the latter, but I did have a slight temperature and I’ve had my flu jab so I assume symptoms would be milder). It started with on Wednesday with that kind of mild sore throat that you barely notice other than in its capacity as a harbinger of worse to come. Then I snuffled my way through work on Thursday (if I hadn’t left my laptop at work I’d have stayed home), before making a poor decision to join in with the evening’s TTT (although very much intending to delete the “Tempo” aspect and just make it a Thursday Ten). With the Christmas pub crawl version coming up, I needed to run at least one in November to “qualify”, although it’s all just a bit of fun and no-one would actually stop me from going. The first half didn’t go too badly at a dialled-back pace, then it got progressively harder on the way back. Fortunately Robin was having an equally terrible time of it, and Jason was happy to pretend he couldn’t have gone faster, so at least we all had company for the slow slog back. It ended up being my slowest ever, by about four minutes.

On the very slow jog home afterwards, my Garmin popped up a performance condition notification of ?20. I checked, and yes, that’s the worst it’s possible to be! When I got home I made myself a curry, and not only made it too spicy (not a phrase you’ll often hear me say) but also picked up the wrong jar and tipped a load of mixed spice in. I’d made a bit much for one portion, but not enough for two, but I soldiered through, hoping the chillis would help attack the cold.

On Friday I half-heartedly worked from home, tying up loose ends ready to switch off and ignore the corporate world for a week. Then I had a ludicrously early night. I was in bed for nearly 12 hours, but my watch said I’d only had about seven hours’ sleep (and not good sleep, at that). Not being one to learn from my mistakes, I went and trundled round parkrun at a very pedestrian pace (coming down the hills slower than I’d go up them on one of the rare occasions when I actually attack the course). Then a quick trip home for a shower and back into town to catch the Camra Real Ale Runabout bus, with a much bigger group than last year or the one before. This time it took us out to Halesworth and back via the Grain brewery. As it’s my birthday on Monday, Jo surprised me with a Colin the Caterpillar cake. Nigel took another photo of us all in front of the bus, so there’s a chance we might make the magazine cover again!

Sunday was mostly spent sitting around trying not to cough, after another long night of poor-quality sleep. I’m hoping I’ll feel better tomorrow, so I can spend my holiday (and my birthday) still not doing anything, but only due to laziness!