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

Something something fiddling with clocks. Also how is it nearly November, and why is it so mild?

My feet have been a bit sore after Sunday, but still functional: I survived a harder than intended club training session on Tuesday, and a much gentler run for beer (finishing with beer and pizza at the Holbrook Swan) on Wednesday.

I discovered this week that text fragment URLs are a thing – follow the “Sunday” link in the previous paragraph for an example.

I took Friday off work, and finally made my Christmas cake (and the extra small one I somehow agreed to make for Nicola for the past few years).

Having said I’d recovered, parkrun was horrendous. I was late leaving home, and probably tired myself out just cycling up the hill to get there, then started several minutes behind the tail walker. I made my way past some of the slower runners, but was struggling to even maintain a glacial pace, with my heart rate through the roof. Fortunately I felt a bit better on Sunday, and went for a long slow run in the Fynn Valley with Holly, on a gloriously sunny day. We managed to accidentally both turn up in the same T-shirt, which must have looked odd to the people we passed – maybe they thought we’d got really lost and were still running the 2022 (?) Framlingham 10k.

I enjoyed Ludwig on iPlayer (or the BBC, as we used to call it), once I’d managed to suspend my disbelief that someone could walk into their twin brother’s job and no-one would notice. I’ve also started watching The Cleaner, which I’d somehow missed (I think I may have watched one episode of the first series), which is entertainingly bonkers.

I’ve still got a cold, but it’s definitely on its way out. I even ordered some LFTs and used one during the week to tell me it’s probably not Covid. These ones specifically say to swab less than an inch into your nostrils, which was kind of disappointing because I never used to tire of the surprise of just how far back into your head you can poke something (and the accompanying realisation that that old “hammer a nail into your nose” trick isn’t really a trick as such). I still used it (the cold, not the nail thing) as an excuse to work from home all week instead of going into the office though.

Having decided that I should probably use my Steam Deck for more than just playing the arcade version of Tetris on an emulator, I had a look round the Steam Store and found Gris on sale for something like £1.79, with a claim that it was like other games I’ve played (specifically Portal – I can’t remember the other one). It’s nothing like Portal, but it reminds me a bit of Limbo. I don’t know how far through it I am, but I’m enjoying it – it’s a nice peaceful game with beautiful design, and low-stress puzzles of sorts that you just kind of meander through, without any possibility of dying.

The weather’s warmed up a lot after last weekend’s cold snap. I ran for coffee on Thursday morning, and got home dripping in sweat despite not having run fast and just wearing shorts and T-shirt.

I did a bit of greyhound sitting on Friday and Saturday, but apart from giving her her lunch that basically just entailed being in the house while she slept.

Sunday was out club’s annual One Lap to Ultra event – six hours to complete as many 4.5 mile laps as you can (or want to), with everyone bringing in food for the stops in between. I managed seven laps (32 miles) again, but as usual the last couple were something of a slog. A few people did eight, and one lunatic managed a very impressive nine. It was pretty windy in places, but at least the forecast rain never amounted to anything more than a bit of drizzle.

Latest key-related incompetence: at work on Tuesday I noticed that my car key was still in my pocket from the weekend (I cycle to work, and don’t usually leave keys in pockets). I needed to use the car on Tuesday night, but figured I’d remember where it was. Then, predictably, I left my jeans in my locker when I got changed to cycle home, so had to get a lift to Felixstowe instead. Pretty sure this is a more-or-less exact repeat of an earlier anecdote … yup.

My latest fox visitor was here again on Friday morning, sleeping on a car roof. I gave him some breakfast, but he had to compete for it with Badger cat.

The BBC show Threads is on iPlayer at the moment, 40 years after its original broadcast. I didn’t watch it in the 80s (we didn’t have a TV) … I knew it was famously bleak, but wasn’t entirely prepared for how it just kept getting relentlessly bleaker. Fortunately the geopolitical situation now is perfectly stable and there’s absolutely no risk of conflict in the middle east or the former Soviet Union spiralling out of control.

I seem to have picked up a cold (or Covid, bird flu etc). The sore throat hit me as I tried to get to sleep on Friday night, and now it’s in the coughing and runny nose stage. I expected that to presage a sub-par performance in the Capel 5 on Sunday, but to my surprise I managed my third-best five mile time. I think the sudden onset of wintry temperatures must have helped.

It took me ages to figure out who one of the team captains (Charles Dundas) on the latest episode of Only Connect reminded me of, but eventually realised it was John Hodgman playing the “I’m a PC” guy from those old Apple ads.

I finally got round to replacing the tyres on the so-called Mini. They’d been popping up intermittently on the MOT as advisories for a while (according to the MOT history, before I bought the car). I paid about a quarter of the cost of the car for the four tyres plus fitting, but fortunately the car was very cheap! I was surprised how much the ride seemed to be improved, but maybe that was my imagination. The old ones still seemed to grip very well, so I’m not sure that has changed much.

I had my flu jab on Monday. No random free blood pressure test this year, and naturally I haven’t followed last year’s advice and made a GP appointment to get it checked properly (also I still need to get round to booking that over-40 health check that I was supposed to have 14 years ago).

I’ve been hearing fox-type noises most nights recently, and spotted a young-looking fox in the garden a couple of times, so I put some food out for him (or her). Not sure whether this one will take food out of my hand like the one that used to frequent the place a few years ago, but it’s fairly bold.

I went down to Totton at the weekend for Phil’s 60th (!) birthday, and was relieved to avoid the traffic nightmares of last time. We went to the pub on Friday night, then dragged Phil out for his annual parkrun at Bartley Park. We were a bit tight for time to walk down there, then discovered that part of the normal route is now unavailable so they’d moved the start, so we had to jog the last bit and arrived with seconds to spare for the start. I managed a half-decent time, finishing in the same 10th place as last time I ran that course (well technically a different course, as it’s gone from two to four laps thanks to a damaged bridge, which also caused the change of start position).

Phil had a party on Saturday night, which was a good chance to catch up with a bunch of people I hadn’t seen for varying amounts of time. In one case we suspected we hadn’t seen each other since I moved away to University in 1988, which feels simultaneously a terrifyingly long time ago and also very recent. A couple of people mentioned that they enjoyed my tales of incompetence on Facebook, and in one case that they missed these weeknotes since leaving Twitter. I reassured him that they were still happening, so hi Gaz if you’ve found your way to the blog!