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

I finally bought a car! I went for the “that one will do for now” approach, and took a chance on a 2007 R56 so-called-Mini Cooper on eBay for the laughably low winning bid of £1020 (the least amount of money I’ve paid for a car since some time around 1993). I took the train to Great Yarmouth on bank holiday Monday afternoon to pick it up, and after some minor snags with not being able to find the address, then having to jump-start it because it had been sitting for a while and had a flat battery (we tried pushing, but couldn’t figure out how to get the steering lock off with no power, and there wasn’t enough space in a straight line), got it home without further incident. The fuel light came on somewhere around Beccles, warning me that there was only enough left for 32 miles, but I wasn’t keen to stop too soon in case the battery hadn’t built up enough charge. I was probably closer to 40 miles from home at that point, but I made it back with it claiming to have two miles’ worth remaining. I finally stopped for fuel on the way to Felixstowe on Tuesday evening, with the display having reached zero en route, then given up.

It seems to be generally in acceptable nick, with some service history and a year’s MOT. There are some areas of peeling lacquer on the paintwork, the wheels are a bit battered and the stereo controls don’t seem to work, but I’m sure they can be sorted one way or another.

I also finally got round to getting some quotes to recover the Smart from Felixstowe, so hopefully I can get that done early next week. Someone pointed me to a “Felixstowe News” facebook group post asking if anyone knew about a “mystery car” that had been parked in a road for some time, and against my better judgement I replied, prompting a message from someone asking me to “contact them urgently” about it “causing issues”. Apparently they’d been in touch with the police and Environmental Health (?), who I imagine had told them it was legally parked. I’m sure they’ll be happy when it goes, anyway.

As mentioned last week, we’ve got a two day developer event at work either side of this weekend, and like an idiot I’ve spent most of my free time this week building and deploying a massively over-engineered framework to run a Connect 4 tournament between bots that people are going to spend an hour and a half writing as a (hopefully) fun programming challenge. It’s pretty much finished now, so fingers crossed it works as planned tomorrow.

I had another go at orienteering today (Sunday), this time in Chantry Park, where some of the controls were a bit trickier to find. At least I remembered to start my Garmin this time!

Much excitement in certain segments of the populace this week at the prospect of a rich old bloke being given a shiny new hat by a man in a dress on behalf of his imaginary friend. Not my cup of tea.

We’ve got a developer event at work at the end of next week, and I’ve ended up volunteering to run a coding challenge by way of a bit of friendly competition to break up the day. I’m basing it on something someone else ran years ago, involving writing a script/program to play a simple game against other people, but decided it would be “simpler” to have people play moves using a simple HTTP interface, rather than everyone uploading code and having it run on a server (with all the nightmares of supporting multiple versions of multiple languages that that would entail). As usual this has snowballed into a bigger project than intended, and I’ve already broken my “the company has long since used up any goodwill that might justify me working on it in my free time” rule. Ah well.

On Friday we were discussing Friday pub lunch plans on WhatsApp, and it turned out I’d be cycling there from the office as the other people going this week were all working at home. Convinced I was running late, I rushed to leave, then was confused to find the car park virtually empty when I arrived and worried that they were shut. Then the truth finally dawned on me, and was confirmed when I got my phone out and found a confused reply to my “leaving now, be there around 12.40” message asking whether I was aware that it was currently only 11.26. Fortunately I persuaded them to meet at 12, so didn’t have to wait around for too long. It was finally warm enough to sit outside, although we’d barely finished eating when a massive (but fortunately brief) thunderstorm started.

This weekend was the Stephen Williams 10k, near Bury St Edmunds. This is only the third year it’s been going, and the other two were held on insanely hot days. This time the temperature was much more reasonable, and it’s hard to fathom how we managed to run it when it was 10–15° warmer. All I could remember was that the first 5k was mostly downhill, obviously meaning you pay for it on the second half, but I’d forgotten about the big hill near the end. I finished with a nasty stitch, and an OK but not great time (albeit much better than last year, which was in turn much better than the year before).

After a few false starts, could it be that spring weather is properly here at last? It seems to have crept up to the extent that I got in the shower after running on Sunday and was slightly taken aback to discover that the back of my neck had slightly burned.

It feels like it’s been a very uneventful week, followed by a packed weekend. Saturday kicked off with parkrun as usual, then after cycling back from Chantry Park and having a short rest I ran down to Christchurch Park, where Suffolk Orienteering Club were holding another of their basic events for newbies. I’ve tried it a couple of times before (despite my famed navigational limitations), but I’m definitely still a beginner. I picked the “long” (3km) course, and after a few mistakes found all 19 controls and got back in a mid-table 26:21. For context, the winner was a 16-year-old girl in 20:12, and the other people ahead of me ranged in age from 12 to 70+. While I was there, and as they were all covered by the fiver I’d paid to enter, I thought I might as well do the 2km and 1km routes too. The medium was clearly not a popular option, as I finished in almost half the time of the person who came second, but on the short I only managed third place. I was also very much the only adult tackling the latter distance – approximately 20 years older, in fact, than all five of the other competitors put together! It’s a good job people were running individually, or I would have looked very odd lining up to compete against a bunch of small children.

On Saturday evening I got the train (which I nearly missed thanks to it leaving from an unexpected platform) to Colchester to see Dingus Khan (with support from My Fat Pony and, of all things, sea shanty outfit Motley Crew) at Colchester Arts Centre. I didn’t know much about them other than having seen frontman Ben Brown supporting Pet Needs a couple of times, and having randomly spoken to the bassist at a HMHB gig. I got the impression that they might be a bit mad, and was not disappointed. An entertaining evening despite not knowing any of the songs in advance. There was a general undercurrent of drunken celebration in Ipswich and on the trains, thanks to ITFC winning promotion back up to the Championship, but I managed to avoid most of it.

After that relaxing Saturday, Sunday morning saw me dragging myself out to the Kesgrave Fun Run, a generally enjoyable local tin pot classic charity 5k(ish) race. Despite tired legs, I managed to get round in 20:36 (which sounds better than it is, with the course coming in 100m or so short of 5k). Then in the evening it was back to Colchester, this time to the Three Wise Monkeys to see Pet Needs again. They were excellent as usual, with great support from Bridget and Hannah Rose Platt. A good venue too, with the distinction of serving beer in actual glasses rather than plastic.

Looking forward to bank holiday Monday to recover (although in reality it’s already nearly Monday lunchtime as I type this).