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

We had a temporary outage with some of our team’s local servers this week after scheduled overnight work on the building’s power – not because the servers failed to come back up, but because they were shut down in preparation, and the power cut caused the building access card system to fail and no-one could get into the server room to switch them back on again. Fortunately they weren’t running anything terribly important, as those things are on more resilient infrastructure (as you would hope!)

After being stuck for ages, I finally got past the last puzzle in chapter two of Portal Revolutions. I had a brief look at a walkthrough guide, but only really enough to convince myself that I hadn’t missed anything, rather than actually taking in the detailed steps. The last few moves did seem pretty straightforward when I went back to it though, so maybe I did remember a few of the instructions!

The beginning of the week was uncomfortably warm for running, but it was nice to be able to sit comfortably outside the pub without any extra layers after Wednesday’s evening’s Run for Beer though (and also after outside Costa after Run for Coffee the same morning).

This week’s Friday 5 (Stowmarket) was warm too, though not as bad as last week, but (in keeping with the never-ending run of summer false starts we seem to be getting this year) the temperature had dropped again in time for the Kesgrave 10k on Sunday.

The main piece of running news though is that I was slightly taken aback on opening my annual London Marathon ballot rejection email to see the words “You’re in!”. I think I’ve entered the ballot seven or eight times, but statistically I think I’ve still beat the odds (last time I heard an estimate of the chance of success it was about one in 15, but I imagine it’s only getting less likely each year). I guess that means I now have to drop my increasingly unconvincing protestations that I was never going to run a marathon.

Well we’ve had the summer solstice now, so I suppose it’ll soon be Christmas.

We had a work experience student at work this week. I’d been talked into hosting him instead of the son of a friend who had originally applied, and only agreed on the basis that someone else in the team who’d done this before would be able to organise things … but then that person was off sick. I got deathly silence from my pleadings for other people to help out too (other than Oli, who kindly offered to look after him on Friday so I didn’t have to do five days in the office), and I ended up doing a fairly poor job, mostly relying on Codecademy and a vague project of building a web site. This is why I’m not a manager.

Bury [St Edmunds] Friday 5 this week, and it was a warm one (though still 10?C cooler than 2022). I was even slower than the past couple of weeks, but everyone else was slower too. I managed to beat Holly (by one second, after an almighty sprint to the finish line), and wasn’t overtaken by Tom three miles in for once.

Another hot day for a long run on Sunday. We ran along the Gipping path, and stopped at Bramford to cool our feet in the river. While Holly was waiting for her feet to dry off, a large german shepherd came springing out of the water and shook itself dry all over her socks and trainers. We resisted the lure of an ice cream from the Co-Op, regretted it by Sproughton where the shop had just shut, and eventually stopped at Morrison’s. They apparently don’t sell individual ice creams, so we ended up getting a five pack of callipos. Dave later pointed out that the petrol garage would’ve been a better bet, but we probably would have paid more there for two than the pack of five!

After work on Tuesday I met up with Matt, one of my university flatmates, who was in Ipswich for the day. We had a few beers and a curry, and a good catchup. I reckon we probably see each other a couple of times a decade or so on average, and as usual much of the conversation was reminiscing about various daft student goings-on, though my recollections at least are getting increasingly blurry with a scarcely believable 30+ intervening years.

I appear to have given up on #48in24 – the difficulty suddenly jumped up a few weeks ago when it went from fizzbuzz-level stuff to “solve this logic puzzle”, and I kind of ground to a halt, defeated by a battle to remember how to write Prolog (and with the knowledge that the other two languages would be far less suitable to the problem). Ah well.

Another Friday 5 this week – our club’s home race in Kirton. I struggled from about halfway again, but still finished quicker than the first two. A fair bit slower than the past couple of years though, but I suppose I am getting older!

I went to Bury St Edmunds on Saturday to see Pet Needs (again), at the Apex. I took the train, and went a bit early so I could have a wander round the Abbey Gardens first. I nipped into the local Wetherspoons (the Corn Exchange) for a pre-show drink and some dinner (thanks to a special on beef madras, if you pretend I would have paid full price for the 660ml bottle of Brewdog beer that I picked as the included drink, the curry itself only cost £2.50). While I was eating I looked up to see the band walk past my table, and Johnny mentioned the pub on stage, describing it as the poshest Wetherspoons he’s ever seen. No word on whether he knows where all the plug sockets are though.

The other bands on the bill were Slughouse, Gabby Rivers and Gaffa Tape Sandy – I think I’ve seen Slughouse before, but not the other two.

My phone battery ran out shortly after I got on the train to come home, which could have been an issue as it had my ticket on it. Fortunately I’d leant back and shut my eyes when the ticket inspector came through the train, and he presumably thought I was asleep and didn’t wake me to ask to see it. Also the barriers at Ipswich station were open, so I didn’t get accused of fare-dodging (I assume this happens to people all the time and there’s a process, but no doubt it would have been a pain of some sort).

Today I was sitting drinking my morning coffee when I slowly became aware that the odd behaviour from Badger cat by my feet was due to him having brought me a sparrow. I quickly got Badger out of the room, but while my back was turned the bird took the opportunity to hide. I managed to find it, by which time it had regained enough composure to start flying round. I eventually caught it, was about to let it out of the window until I saw Ninja cat lurking outside, so thought better of it and released it in the front garden instead. I’m pleased to report that it took off from my hand and flew across the road to some trees, apparently no worse for the experience.

I started the week by giving blood (donation number 63). I could have donated at any time since March, but had been putting it off for a while because I didn’t want it to interfere with races. Their requests for donation seemed to have been getting increasingly frantic lately (I’ve since been told that they’re at a “pre-amber” status), and I figured helping keep someone alive was more important than potentially finishing a few seconds slower when my times aren’t exactly competitive anyway! Fortunately my haemoglobin levels seem fine these days (thank you, multivitamin and iron tablets), and the blood seemed to pour out quickly.

On Tuesday we had another work meal, but this time with most of us present rather than just a few leads. We went to Mr Wing’s, which operates on an all you can eat basis but with specific dishes brought to you rather than buffet style, so naturally I ate far too much.

On my Steam Deck-inspired retro gaming binge (not really retro – to me that would be Space Invaders etc) I’ve now finished Portal 2, and moved onto Portal: Revolution, an excellent free unofficial sequel that I’d not played before.

Another Friday 5 on … er … Friday – this time Framlingham, which is also in the Suffolk Grand Prix series. I started OK, but after a couple of miles the missing red blood cells started catching up with me, and Holly started pulling away. Then Tom passed me too, which was more annoying because he’s in the same old man age category as me.

I dragged myself out for a slow parkrun on Saturday, then attempted a long run on Sunday, which turned into a bit of a fiasco. The original plan had been to run a trail route I’ve done before to Felixstowe, stop for chips at the seaside, then get a train back, but that didn’t quite work out …

Firstly, distracted by bumping into the Harpers near Foxhall stadium, I completely forgot to turn off and completely forgot where I was going and missed a turning. After a quick diversion we got back on the route, only to find it largely blocked by nettles and brambles. With a small detour into the field, then a pause to find sticks to beat the undergrowth aside with, we eventually made it to a proper path again. Once across the A12, I suddenly remembered having to fight through brambles on the other side when the rest of the path had been fine. Fortunately it wasn’t much worse today, and we were soon on the open pasture, but still walking due to the lack of any visible path.

After reaching the road (past a herd of cows that fortunately just stared rather than giving chase), I realised we’d diverged from my planned route again, but figured we could follow a path through the farm and rejoin it. After much head-scratching we seemed to be back on track, but imagine my surprise when we suddenly reached the A12 again! Somehow I’d ended up following the trace on the map on my watch in the wrong direction (should have worn the orienteering bifocals!). At this point it seemed wise to cut our losses, give up on the chips, and turn it into a circular route. Had we known that the next couple of miles of path had completely disappeared, to be replaced by fields full of head-high nettles, we might have made a different choice.

We eventually made it through (with a small diversion round the edge of a farmer’s field), but even when the going got easier my body had apparently given up, with my heart rate up in the 180s even at a very gently pace, so there was even more walking. We ended up taking 3 hours 21 minutes to cover a mere 11.6 miles! It’s a good job Holly has a sense of humour and was prepared to chalk it down as an “adventure”, otherwise I think I might have lost a running buddy. It’s now five hours later, and my legs are still tingling horrendously from all the nettle stings and bramble scratches – next time I think I’ll take a machete!

Another four-day week that felt longer, and the weather continues to lurch between winter and summer. Perhaps now May is finally out, we can finally cast that clout?

I didn’t do much useful with the bank holiday, other than changing the pads on the rear brake on my bike. I didn’t do a good enough job of backing the callipers off, and ended up giving myself some bonus exercise by cycling five miles each way to work with the brakes binding. Not exactly what I needed, sandwiched in between a 6 mile run for coffee in the morning and club training in the evening!

A few of us from work went to the Maybush for a meal on Wednesday, to meet a new joiner to the team, who’s in Ipswich for a couple of weeks to find his feet before being exiled to Birmingham, where we’re being forced to recruit people now (despite the rest of us being based here), because reasons. Fortunately that was one of the days when the weather cooperated (apart from a couple of spots of rain), and we were able to sit outside by the river.

This week saw the first fixture of the Friday 5 series (five mile road races), in Sudbury. I just about managed to scrape under 35 minutes, but hopefully I can improve on that as the series goes on. It was a reasonable temperature for running, but got a bit chilly standing around afterwards.

For a bit of a change on Sunday I had another go at orienteering, with a score event in Holywells and Landseer parks, which involved visiting as many controls as you could in 45 minutes, in whatever order you wanted. I remembered to start my watch for once, and did a slightly better job of navigating this time, although I did give up on one control after wasting too long looking. My main mistake was to leave my watch on auto-pause, which meant guessing how long I actually had left after adding on stationary time. Oh, and my other mistake was forgetting that the map contained symbols describing the specific control locations (eg by a tree, or on a bridge), which would have simplified the search. I ended up a minute and a half over time, which meant losing two controls’ worth of points, but at least I wasn’t last! Neil and I ran a circuitous route back along the Orwell (after passing the pesky control that neither of us could find, to prove it actually existed!) and through Ravenswood, to tot up a few extra miles.

No mow May (and other months) rumbles on.