Kerry Buckley What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

Thought for a minute I must have messed up my week numbers at some point, but week 52 rolls over into 2023, so all is good.

Obviously the key fact this week is that it’s (as Noddy Holder would say) CHRIIISTMAAAAAS! Bah Humbug, etc.

I finally took a decent chunk of time off work, finishing on the 20th and not going back until a couple of days into the new year. The first few days were largely spent relaxing (also cake marzipanning and icing, and mince pie making), and realistically I can’t see huge amounts of domestic productivity happening during the rest of it either.

I gave blood for the 59th time on Wednesday, and scored a mince pie rather than the usual biscuits. I somehow also avoided hearing Last Christmas on the radio that they always have playing. Once again my finger blood was reluctant to drop in the copper sulphate solution, but recorded a solid pass on the fancy machine (or possibly I have more haemoglobin in my index finger than the one next to it).

A double parkrun weekend, with Christmas Eve falling on a Saturday and the traditional extra Christmas Day extra one on Sunday. Also the annual Stutton & Holbrook charity fun run (it’s definitely a race) to fit in between, on Saturday lunchtime. Didn’t go too badly considering the red blood cell depletion.

Cycling home from parkrun on Christmas morning (when the roads were delightfully empty – Christmas or a pandemic every day please!) I encountered a lady who’d just collapsed on the pavement. There was a chap who’d seen it happen and was trying to help her, but she was kneeling face down and apparently refusing or unable to sit up. He called an ambulance, but that didn’t seem to be going well (I ended up speaking to them because it seemed they were having trouble with his English or accent), and eventually we got her up and into the car of another passer-by who offered to take her to the hospital instead (and who in a weird coincidence happened to be someone I know, but hadn’t seen for ages). I think she was probably just shaken, and once she’d got up was more concerned about being a nuisance and not turning up to sing in the choir at her church than anything else.

My Christmas festivities were once again limited to cooking a far-too-large roast for one, which barely fitted on my plate, despite having an Alan Partridge style scam going. Managed to squeeze in a tiny Christmas pudding and a mince pie in the evening, but it was a struggle!

A cold week. We only got a tiny flurry of snow here, but it never really got above freezing, so wherever there was a dusting (or just frost) it hung around all week. Looks like temperatures are set to rocket back up into double figures tomorrow though.

Because I’m a grumpy old bah humbug Scrooge McGrinch I don’t really do anything much for actual Christmas (other than cook myself a massive dinner), but all the action ends up in the week or two before. This was certainly the case in the past few days, with the usual monthly Run for Beer on Wednesday, a curry on Thursday, the FRR running pub crawl in Felixstowe on Friday, then on Saturday what’s now becoming the traditional ten pub/ten mile Christmas run (which actually included 13 pubs, but fortunately we stuck to halves in all but the first and last).

I got talked into running a quiz for our team meeting on Friday, which seemed to go OK, despite requiring me to coordinate three windows at once to show the questions on Teams, operate the buzzer system and keep score.

My fox-chasing-the-cats reel on Facebook has now apparently been watched three million times. I don’t really understand why.

Must remember to book some time off work.

Well it’s definitely properly cold now. Much as I liked to moan about it being too hot all through the summer, since the clocks went back and it got cold and damp I seem to have become mysteriously averse to leaving the house unnecessarily. I’d only been out for a “normal” run (ie just heading out on my own rather than an organised event) three times, and two of those were end-of-month panics to get a photo for my monthly hollow tree challenge. I also hadn’t run more than ten miles in one go since September. Friday was sunny though, and I had the day off, so I dragged myself out for a gentle 13 miles in the countryside.

The social running’s still going on though, and becoming more alcohol-focussed as we approach Christmas, starting with the TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten) Christmas special on … er … Wednesday. Rather than the usual ten mile time trial, this one basically involved running to the Fat Cat for a pint, then to the Duke of York for another, then the Dove, the Last Anchor, St Judes and finally the Cricketers for a final beer and a burger. I even added an extra loop on my way home to round up to the nominal ten miles.

I posted the video of a fox chasing the cats to Instagram last week, which these days means it’s a “reel”, and ticked the box to share it to FaceBook. For some reason the algorithms decided to start showing it to lots of people, and I kept getting notifications that more and more people had watched it (last time it told me it was 100k). More annoyingly, I get a notification every time someone likes it (800+ at time of writing), which for someone who doesn’t like leaving those little unread message badges sitting on apps/tabs is quite annoying.

I’m still just about still doing Advent of Code (albeit a day or two behind). Usually by now I hit one where my naive solution that works for the sample data looks set to take until the death of the universe to run against the bigger real input, get bored and give up – I expect that to happen any time now. My solutions (in Elixir, although for some reason they always end up looking more like Haskell) are on GitHub.

The other night the camera caught two badgers in the garden at once:

Work Christmas meal this week, which I guess means the festive season must have started. It was on Thursday, which was the first day of December, making it borderline acceptable. We began with a few games of Lazer [sic] Tag at the place over the road from the office, which was good harmless fun. I didn’t come particularly close to the top of any leaderboards, but for some strange reason my accuracy rate was way above everyone else’s (like two or three times higher). If only we’d been paying for each imaginary bullet I’d have got a bargain.

That was followed (via the Dove for a couple of pints) by dinner at The Forge. The meal was good, but that has to be the most hipster place I’ve ever been in. People were ordering drinks that came in wooden boxes and massive lanterns, or were on fire. We then popped into the Nelson for a couple more pints (well I think two or three of us might have had pushed the boat out and had a couple, while most were apparently more restrained). As usual, I wore my Bah Humbug T-shirt, which is older than a lot of my colleagues.

It was the second cross country fixture of the season on Sunday, at Sutton Heath near Woodbridge. After resetting the calibration on my watch to stop the distance from my foot pod reading too high, it now seems to be reading low, so I spent the whole race thinking I was running slower than I was and wondering why 7:15 pace felt so tough. Turned out I actually finished two minutes quicker than last year, although it was a lot less muddy this time round. As at Framlingham, I caught Robin about three miles in, but this time didn’t manage to stay in front and finished a couple of yards behind him. One all.

I’m still regularly getting foxes and badgers in the garden. The other night I caught a video of a fox chasing Ninja cat, which doesn’t usually happen (they mostly completely ignore each other) I was in the kitchen at the time, and both cats who were out came flying in through the flap at great speed.

I reached the end of the Angel boxset this week, which means I’ve now watched all of Firefly, seven seasons of Buffy and five of Angel, plus all the special features and commentaries for the latter two, since the beginning of the year. No, you’re a saddo with no social life.