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

A horribly hot week, peaking on Friday when I measured 39.8°C in the shade outside my window, and a foot-searing 57.3°C from the paving slabs in the sunshine. I was working at home that day, but managed to keep things just about bearable by shutting all the windows and curtains and having a big fan running.

We had some work experience students at work this week. Brad did a good job of organising things for them, including shadowing people from all the team projects for an hour or two. It’s always a reminder of how many layers of things there are to know when you have someone like that working with you … OK, We’re adding a query to a GraphQL API, which means … Let’s start with a test. This is ExUnit … oh, and it’s written in Elixir … wait, writing a test first probably seems odd – have you seen TDD before? We’re going to mock this function, which we do when … and so on. No heads exploded, and they claimed to have found it interesting, at least to our faces.

I think I’ve now got my old yellow bike back into a rideable condition. I gave up trying to adjust the front shifter (the spring doesn’t seem powerful enough to pull the back onto the small ring), but unlike last time (2009) instead of giving up and buying a fixed gear bike I found a second hand 105 mech on eBay for a fiver, which works perfectly. I’ve not ridden it yet, but assuming it’s all good that takes me up to 4½ working bikes (the mountain bike is borderline).

Despite the heat, I managed to drag myself round the Stowmarket Friday 5 (33°C!) and the Kesgrave 10k on Sunday (ten degrees cooler, but still felt really warm). Then a bunch of us finished the week with the semi-traditional Sunday evening beers and food at the Cricketers.

Merry solstice!

I got an email from Anglian Water saying that I appear to have another leak (a mere one litre per hour this time). I assume this just means they didn’t do a great job of repairing the leaky meter last time, but I need to remember to turn the stop cock off overnight at some point to check. There’s no indication of any joined-up thinking at their end – you’d think maybe something would flag up the fact that there was a leak at the same property only a couple of months ago.

The weather’s been heating up (too much if you ask me), and after a couple of weeks with strong winds and/or threatened rain we had no excuse not to cycle to Felixstowe for Tuesday’s training session. Neil and I had a leisurely ride there with a bit of a headwind, and were joined by the less leisurely Dave and Ryan for a fairly speedy ride back, making the most of the wind at our backs.

Back to the Fat Cat on Wednesday for the delayed meet-up with current (Rupert) and ex- (Mel and Tony) colleagues. It was nice to be able to sit outside at last, and I also benefitted from a one-pound pint as it was the end of the cask (well it was Mel who benefitted really, as it was his round).

The heat had really set in ready for the Bury Friday 5. For some reason this one always seems to be warm – at least since the 30°C one in 2022 – and this year we were running in temperatures only about a degree below that. Unsurprisingly I was a minute and a half slower than a couple of weeks ago at Sudbury!

On Saturday I made a flying visit to Southampton for a celebration of the life of my brother in law Pad, who died suddenly in his sleep last month (my sister lives in Spain, so the funeral itself had been over there). As usual with these things, it was nice to catch up with some relatives I’d not seen for far too long, but we’d all have preferred it to have been in better circumstances. It was a happy occasion though, as he’d have wanted – they’d booked out the pub where they held their wedding reception, and one of Pad’s friends had but together a booklet full of photos and people’s recollections, in the style of a Southampton FC programme, and had copies printed up for everyone.

I decided to ignore the heat and go for an easy run on Sunday, and for some reason set out at the warmest part of the day for what I originally planned to be a loop out along by the Orwell and back through Nacton. Checking the route near Levington I realised that I wasn’t all that far from Trimley, and decided to head that way instead and get the train back. While making that decision a weasel appeared and dropped a dead mouse at my feet, which was exactly as weird as it sounds. Nearing Trimley I asked my phone to direct me on the shortest route to the Half Moon for a quick bit of pre-train rehydration, but Google warned me that it would be shut so for some reason I then decided to continue into Felixstowe. After a quick pint at the Owl and Pussycat I continued down to the pier, then along the front and up to the station. Apart from the heat it was a nice route, mostly on the new(ish) King Charles coastal path. Apart from the weasel I saw a couple of muntjacs, loads of dragonflies and some oystercatchers.

I had to buy petrol this week, for the first time since mid-February. It was noticeably more expensive, but less than it was in October 2023. Assuming Trump’s “I’ve spent a huge amount of money, killed a load of people, destabilised the world and now I’m bragging about leaving everything more-or-less as it was before” peace deal isn’t just another stage in his global pump-and-dump scheme, I guess it might go down again soon.

Back to the Spread Eagle quiz on Wednesday, with Rachel, Heather and Perry. We came third, which wouldn’t sound too bad if I didn’t tell you that there were only four teams. Or that the other three only contained two people each. Still, it was a fun night, even if it meant missing a track session (and nearly a Fat Cat evening too, but that got postponed because only two people could make it).

I’ve been enough to get free broadband from work for a long time, but for what seem to be spurious reasons to do with billing system inflexibility (my line is what’s called “res official”, which will no longer be a thing after the switch to digital voice) they “can’t” continue to offer it for free. The only upside is that although I know have to pay, I get upgraded to the top full-fiber package. The engineer came and did that on Thursday, bumping my download speed from 350Mb/s to 950Mb/s. To be honest the old speed was more than I needed, but big number = better, right?

A chap knocked on the door on Monday saying he lived round the corner, and did I want him to fell the dead apple tree for free and take the wood away for his log burner. Given that someone had previously offered to do it for several hundred pounds, this seemed like a win/win situation, so I accepted. He said it probably wouldn’t be for a few weeks but messaged me later to ask if he could pop round on Friday to remove the ivy in preparation. He started doing that, but it turned out that the ivy had been structural, and the tree fell down of its own accord part way through (fortunately not landing on him or anything else), so he ended up sawing it up and taking the logs away anyway. You can see from the photo below that all but the outside inch or so of the trunk was basically mush. Hard to believe (or maybe not) that it’s nearly four years since the branches started falling off it.

On Friday, as we did last year, a few of us had a gentle run round the route of the defunct Ipswich Friday 5 before adjourning to the clubhouse/Cricketers to celebrate Neil’s birthday. Then somehow we ended up there again for second breakfast after parkrun on Saturday. On Sunday I joined Holly, Maria and Gary for a “short long run” (it ended up being about 15 miles) through the Fynn Valley. Holly peeled off to head home as we got close to town on the way back, but the others fancied some refreshment so we stopped at the clubhouse again. I thought we’d find Dave and Ryan there after a long bike ride, but it turned out that hadn’t happened.

On Sunday evening I got a message from Sally asking whether anyone could provide some emergency shed assistance, as Dave was trying to put the half-roof on the half-shed that he’d relocated from its other half, and it was two heavy for the two of them to manage. I popped over, as did Rob, Jo and Courtney, and it only took Dave, Rob and me about five minutes to manhandle it into place, after which we all spent a couple of hours in the garden drinking beer and chatting (which is why this entry is a day late).

I started the week with the “A14 Track Challenge” on Monday (well, I started it with work, but that’s not interesting even by the standards of these notes). This is a friendly 5000m race on the Northgate track between St Edmund Pacers, Stowmarket Striders, Ipswich Jaffa and (for the past two years) Felixstowe Road Runners. Once again I was in the middle race (20–23 minutes), and despite tired legs from racing on Friday night and also running (slowly) on Saturday and Sunday I managed to finish not too far outside 21 minutes. It was a nice sociable occasion with everyone supporting the runners in the two races they weren’t in themselves, and the threatened rain held off too.

The weather was less kind on Tuesday, soaking us on the morning’s run for coffee (we decided to skip the coffee rather than having to stand round dripping while we drunk it). Fortunately there was a dry window in the afternoon when I cycled to the dentist (just a checkup, with no issues). Only just though – ten minutes after I got home the heavens opened in a fairly biblical fashion, complete with hail and thunder. Apparently there were some properly flooded roads down in the town centre.

It was pay letter week, and I was unsurprised to find my apparently valuable contributions rewarded once again with a well-below-inflation 1% increase. Not doing much to dissuade me from thinking about retirement in the relatively near future.

On Saturday, new cables having arrived, I finished putting my old road bike back together. The front shifter still stubbornly resists all attempts to get it working properly, which is basically the reason I stopped riding it back in 2009. Maybe I need to just replace it, or perhaps take it out and treat it to an oil bath to loosen it up (is that a real thing, or just something Luke did to R2-D2?).

On Sunday I went for a slow solo run round all the parks on Ipswich council’s list, plus Broomhill which is missing but was more or less en route (unlike Whitehouse which is miles out of my way and not even a decent park). I stopped at a Co-op at around ten miles to buy a Callipo, then again at about 14 to fortify myself with some late lunch and a pint, before the final stretch up the hill to get home. I met the daft cat that sometimes hangs out on the Wellesley Road railway bridge, but that I hadn’t seen for a few years. It was extremely keen for fuss and attention, and when I tried to leave it kept running alongside me for the first few yards and trying to get in front of my feet.

The heatwave continued for the early part of the week at least. On bank holiday Monday I went for a gentle ten mile trail run with Neil, Jason and Chris, and it was something like 26?C, which made it surprisingly tiring.

I worked at home on Tuesday for some reason that I can’t remember, so missed out on air conditioning but also on what would have been a warm ride there and back. I did ride out to Felixstowe with Neil for club training, but fortunately it had cooled off a bit my then.

I belatedly ordered a new fan for the bedroom to replace the one that exploded while I was using it with my indoor bike trainer (the floor fan I bought at the time is a bit more on the industrial side, and is about ten times too loud and blowy to ever be able to use while I was sleeping). I got a SilentNight-branded one didn’t cost a huge amount and seems to work pretty well – it even has a low-speed sleep mode and a remote control which means no getting up to turn it on/off/up/down during the night.

Every so often I remember that if I want a quick break from work I can go for a walk in the countryside without even having to leave site. I had a wander in the woods and past the old pond on Wednesday, which was very pleasant.

Friday was another Friday 5 race – this time at Framlingham. I was still feeling worn out from the heat, and ended up around half a minute slower than last week. Handily race HQ is at the sports club, which means there’s a bar available for a post-race pint. This was followed on Saturday morning with a very slow parkrun, then on Sunday a bunch of us went for a social jog round the old (and superior) Ipswich parkrun course at Chantry Park. I made some doughnuts for afterwards, which seemed to go down well, but forgot to take a photo of them. On the way back I managed to beat my best time on the infamous Woodville Burn uphill Strava segment – I think the lower gearing on the red bike suits it well.

Over the weekend I finally got round to switching the brake cables on my road bike round to normal UK spec, so I’m no longer in danger of losing control by accidentally braking the wrong wheel. I also started trying to replace the gear cables on the yellow bike I’m slowly reassembling, before realising that the ones I’d ordered had the wrong ends on them. I’ve now ordered a proper full set of actual Shimano cables to do the job properly.

Back the the clubhouse (aka Cricketers) on Sunday evening to sit in the garden for a few beers and some food with the usual crowd, but a more civilised finish time this week, what with everyone having to be at work the next day.