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

On time this week (assuming I keep typing and press publish before the evening’s out).

It finally got cold, barely getting above freezing for a few days, then suddenly hit 17°C again on Sunday. I turned my heating on, then turned it off again (to paraphrase the old Aardman ad, although I don’t “heat electric”).

On Monday morning there seemed to be a lot of noisy magpies in the garden. Then while I was making coffee Badger cat dragged one of them in through the flap. I initially assumed it was dead, then it started hopping round the kitchen and perching on chairs. It seemed like it might have had an injured wing, but maybe not too seriously, so (mindful of Dave’s tale of being on the brink of dropping a rock onto what he thought was a fatally injured pigeon when it flew off) I caught it and released it over the fence into next door’s garden to give it a fighting chance.

On Thursday we had an office volunteering day at the Suffolk Owl Sanctuary, digging out a load of sand and wheelbarrowing it away. It wasn’t all hard work though – we got a flying display, and got to see all the owls, plus meerkats and armadillos.

Sunday was the Hadleigh 10, with Storm Bert in full effect. Fortunately we only got the wind though, and no rain. The race was a slog, and several minutes slower than when I last ran it a couple of years ago. I need to somehow find some form over the winter in time for London!

I still haven’t put my TV aerial up, but figured I should probably leave getting up on the roof for a weekend without 50mph gusts.

Oops, nearly forgot. Only four days late.

I got an email from Anglian Water saying there’s been a “small increase” in my water usage, and they’re increasing my payments “to match”. I had been paying £7 a month, which admittedly did seem a bit low, but apparently it’s now increasing to £36! I looked into it, and last month I only used 14% more than the same month in 2023. I think what happened is that they read the meter after a long gap, and adjusted the payment accordingly, but I suspect they’ve gone too far in the other direction and I’ll end up building up a credit balance. This is why I specifically sought out a gas and electricity tariff where they just send me a bill each month for the amount I’ve used and I pay it by direct debit, rather than faffing around with trying to guess the monthly average across the year.

I had the week off work, and as usual did hardly any of the things on my notional to-do list. I did finally remove and saw up the two fallen branches from the apple tree though (after only a couple of years), although I’m yet to get rid of the logs and branches. This has returned about half what I’ll optimistically call my lawn (it took longer to get the brambles out of the way than it did to remove the actual branches), but I still have a way to go to clear enough space to finally put the greenhouse up.

I glanced up while eating breakfast on Wednesday and there was a woodpecker in the remains of the apple tree. I only managed to get a terrible photo though.

On Saturday I went on another of the Camra “Real Ale Runabout” bus tours, this time to Aldeburgh. It was a fun day, even if there was quite a wait to get served in a couple of the pubs, and the choice was basically down to which Adnams beer you wanted. We got the back seet in the bus too!

Sunday was my birthday, but I decided to treat Saturday as the celebration so I didn’t really do anything, other than a bit of solo trail running.

Not content with waking up on Wednesday to the news that the US was about to reelect the worst president of modern times (this time without any pretence from half the country of not knowing exactly what they were voting for), Duolingo then decided to troll me with this:

On a less depressing note, here’s a better photo of the fox, from one of his daylight visits:

Sunday was the Stowmarket Scenic 7, and after feeling ridiculously out of breath on a very slow run on Friday I wasn’t expecting much. It didn’t go too badly in the end though – only a couple of seconds slower than last year. I ran most of it with or just behind Holly, then unchivalrously out-sprinted her to the line, which I think I’ll be getting stick for for a while!

The YouView app on my TV updated itself at some point, undoing my downgrade and removing the Channel 4 app again (although the actual programmes are still available if you search). I guess I’m going to have to put an aerial up after all. The only plus point is that from my research on which one to buy it appears that reception here has vastly improved since last time I looked (we used to be in a sector of the output from Sudbury that was attenuated to avoid interference with the continent).

There was some weird (presumably BST/GMT-change-related in some way) glitch on the council web site at the weekend, that had it showing everyone’s bins as due to be collected a day early. I actually put mine out, which I forget to do half the time even on the normal day, but no, they were collected on Wednesday as usual. Except for the brown one, which lingered un-emptied until Thursday.

The fox is still dropping by now and again looking for food, and still isn’t bothered by the cats (or vice versa).

My TV suddenly started refusing to connect to iPlayer etc, which isn’t ideal as I don’t have an aerial. Resetting the TV/YouView app brought iPlayer and Channel 5 back, but ITV and Channel 4 had disappeared. I’m not bothered about ITV or 5, but the lack of Channel 4 made it harder (but not impossible) to watch Taskmaster. Digging around on some forums lots of people seemed adamant that it’s impossible to get those channels on YouView on a Sony TV without having an aerial plugged in for the initial setup, which I know isn’t true, but I was thinking maybe I’d have to replace the aerial that I took down before it fell down in a storm a few years ago. Fortunately removing updates from the app seems to have restored it to a working version from simpler times, at least for now.

A busy week of running, with a track session on Wednesday on top of the usual Tuesday club training, plus the return of the TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten), trying to navigate round hordes of trick-or-treaters. Then an extremely slow parkrun, and the first of this season’s cross country fixtures on Sunday, at Framlingham.

It’s still unseasonably warm (or maybe this is the new normal, as we race towards inevitable extinction), although I have put the heating on briefly a couple of times.