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

A trip on the train to Colchester on Tuesday to see Beans on Toast with support from Ann Liu Cannon) at the lovely Colchester Arts Centre. I discovered via Instagram the next day that Frank Turner was standing somewhere not far behind me, and apparently Pet Needs were there too, nicely linking up the three artists/bands I’ve seen most recently.

I hadn’t seen him live before, but it was great, and (for me at least) the kind of show where you just go along and listen to songs you mostly haven’t heard before, rather than knowing all the words and (badly) singing along. Also notable for the first song I’ve heard about ChatGPT, including the inevitable AI-generated chorus.

Tarpley 20 on Sunday – that day of the year when I wonder what I’m doing racing that far when – unlike seemingly everyone else – I’m not training for a marathon. I managed to shave another couple of minutes off my PB though, coming in at 2:33:13. I suspect I’ll be glad of the fact I’m working at home tomorrow.

It feels like something else must have happened at some point during the week, but nothing springs to mind.

It’s unseasonably warm again. I keep hearing rumours of another “Beast from the East” on its way, but there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly noteworthy in the forecast, so it’s probably just tabloid nonsense.

The roadster is now MOTed for another year (or until I buy another car and sell it). It initially failed – for the first time since I bought it – not unexpectedly given the iffy brakes (the failure was actually on handbrake lever travel). As I suspected, I’d not quite got the self-adjusting widgets reinstalled properly, but £84 later they’ve corrected my error. The brakes may actually feel better than ever – I think me bleeding them after replacing the shoes may have sorted the sponginess that I’ve expected to fail the past seven MOTs but never did. Total mileage since the previous year’s test: 1,882 (which is only 69 more than I ran in the same period).

I went for a meal at Trong’s on Thursday, which was a thank you for Anders and me from our boss for organising some software good practices training for our Indian colleagues. Great food, but probably not helpful in my quest to be less of a Massive Fat Man (especially as it also meant missing another TTT).

On the other hand, I did run 60 miles over the course of the week, including three Runs for Coffee and one for Beer, and finishing with a steady 18 on Sunday morning (although that culminated in a pre-lunchtime three pints in the local Wetherspoon’s). Next week I’ll be taking it easy in preparation for the Tarpley 20, so it’ll be much less strenuous (apart from Tarpley itself, obviously).

I finished James Acaster’s Guide to Quitting Social Media, which was most amusing, although I’d be interested to know how he managed to text Clancy Delahue to ask for money for more spy stuff, given that his phone was in a storage unit in Rhyll with the screen covered in tar. This may make limited sense if you haven’t read the book. I’m now reading Randall “XKCD” Munroe’s What If?, and it feels very odd not being able to click the images to read the alt text.

This week seems to have flown by (maybe because I posted last week’s notes in Wednesday), but nothing very interesting to report.

My car’s malfunctioning seems to have settled into a rhythm now. Every Tuesday it briefly cuts out as I join the A14 at the Seven Hills roundabout, then seems to reset, bump start itself, have a quick think about which gear it wants to be in, then carry on its way. On the journey home it does something similar, but with the addition of showing a battery warning for a minute or two afterwards. It’s booked in for an MOT on Wednesday – I’m still vaguely intending to replace it soon, but if it passes it would hopefully mean I could get a bit more for it.

We seem to have got back into the habit of Friday Pub at work, after an accidental winter hiatus, which is nice. Obviously we’re eating indoors now, after mostly restricting ourselves to beer gardens for a couple of years.

I made my third (and final) batch of marmalade on Saturday, which came out the best (I now have three open jars so I could sample them all). That should last me through to next year’s Seville oranges (I get through a surprising amount of marmalade – Paddington is an amateur, to be honest).

I finally managed to upgrade my work app to Elixir 1.14. Every time I tried before I’d been hit with a race condition in some code which set up named pipes to talk to shell scripts (so as to stop sensitive arguments appearing in the ps output). I thought I’d “solved” it by putting a short sleep in the asynchronous task that read from the pipe so that it was always reading before the writer started writing, but to no-one’s great surprise the dirty feeling that gave me was justified, and it wasn’t 100% reliable. I finally solved it properly by scrapping the fifo nonsense and launching the scripts with Rambo.

On a roll, I also upgraded to Phoenix 1.7, even though it’s only at release candidate status at the moment. I decided to migrate everything to the new verified routes, which was a very tedious process (I couldn’t think of a way to automate any more than the simplest routes, or at least not one that would justify the time spent). Nice to be back on the cutting edge again though.

Fairly standard running stuff this week, including a run for coffee, a club session, a parkrun and cross country. The latter went better than expected, with another victory in my ongoing series battle against Robin (who I never come close to beating on the road). To be fair he’s deep into marathon training, although as usual I seem to be also doing a lot of the training, just without the intent to actually enter one.

We also did a club run to donate some food to the local Salvation Army food bank, as part of the runr Food Bank Run initiative. As well as the warm feeling of helping the community, the sensation of suddenly not having a rucksack full of tins on your back for the run back was a nice bonus.

A few days late again this week, but I finally remembered.

The week began well. In the early hours of Monday morning I heard a cat being sick, but was too lazy to get up and deal with it. Having gone back to sleep I forgot about it altogether, until I got up and walked over to open the curtains in my bare feet, without paying attention to where I was stepping.

I actually went to two gigs this week, and both were in Ipswich, meaning I could cycle. Thursday was Pet Needs (plus Ecto Beach and Ben Brown) at the Smokehouse, an excellent small venue that I’d not been to before, and Saturday was Frank Turner (plus Wilswood Buoys and Lottery Winners) at the Corn Exchange. Both were most enjoyable.

A couple of hours in a mosh pit on Saturday night was possibly not the best preparation for the Great Bentley half on Sunday, but it went better than I’d expected. Still a minute or two outside my PB, but a semi-respectable 1:34:29. Much nicer weather than is traditional for that race probably helped.

I managed to summon up enough energy on Sunday afternoon to make my second batch of marmalade – just one to go now!