I succumbed to temptation and bought another fixed-gear bike off eBay. It’s a conversion of an Italian road bike from, at a guess, the early 90s, and seemed like a bargain at around £100 plus delivery. It looked great when it arrived, and seems to work well based on a couple of rides. In an ideal world the frame would probably be a fraction bigger, and I might put a smaller sprocket on to up the gear ratio a bit, but it should make a decent summer commuter while I (in theory) do some maintenance on my usual purple machine.
It looks like I might have finally got to the bottom of my water leak, after a couple of months (95% of which time was admittedly me procrastinating).
Anglian Water contacted me in February after fitting a smart meter, to tell me that it was showing a constant flow of about 15 litres/hour (it’s dropped a bit since), indicating a leak which I needed to get fixed. After doing some investigations myself, which also involved clearing out the impromptu jungle which had colonised the passage round the side of my house, I admitted defeat and contacted a company through Checkatrade. They claimed to do leak detection, but just sent round a normal plumber who looked around, confirmed what I already knew, and said they’d need to send their leak specialist instead. They clearly didn’t fancy the job, because that’s the last I heard from them and they stopped replying to messages.
I was going to contact the company that came and looked at my kitchen hot water pipe leak, but when their website said that most people’s home insurance includes trace and access cover, I thought I’d better check. Turns out they were right – I knew I wasn’t covered for repair to external pipework, but finding the leak was covered.
The insurers arranged for a different company to send someone round, and they spent all of Friday morning running tests and pumping gas through the pipes, before eventually pinpointing the leak to … the smart meter. Which means that after all that faffing it’s not my problem, it’s Anglian Water’s. Now I’ve told them that, I assume they’ll send someone round with a spanner and a bit of PFTE tape and fix it in five minutes.
The annoying thing is that there was clearly water in the hole where the meter lives, but I (and both lots of plumbers) had assumed that wasn’t the leak because there was no sign of movement and the level seemed constant.
Kesgrave parkrun for a change this week, which is a lot flatter than Christchurch Park where I normally go. I didn’t really have any excuse to take it easy, so actually put a bit of effort in for once. I thought my time was OK-ish when I finished, but when the results came out it turned out to have been my quickest on that course, and my highest ever age grade, which is encouraging (especially with the Twilight 5k coming up next weekend). I knew I wouldn’t be running on Sunday, so went back out after lunch for some easy trail miles down to the river.
On Sunday I got up at 4am to get the coach down to London for the marathon, although fortunately this year I was only supporting rather than running! After dropping off the runners, we popped into a Wetherspoons for those who hadn’t brought breakfast with them to buy some (and to wait until 9am when they started serving beer!), then found a spot just past the Cutty Sark to watch from. We saw the leaders come past on their way to the historic double sub-2, then waited for our friends Haydn, Dave, Maria and the two Sams to come past. At that point some stayed on to wait for other club runners further down the field, but we didn’t have a great view there and the rest of us traipsed under the Greenwich foot tunnel to a quieter section in Millwall. From there we saw the same FRR people again, almost missing Maria entirely but actually managing to get a decent photo of Dave. Unfortunately we were standing by a subtle speed bump, and we saw a woman fall down but get up mostly unharmed, then a Belgian chap went down much harder and smacked his head on the ground. We had Nic (a retired midwife) and Ali (a nurse) with of us, so they helped until the St John Ambulance people arrived. They cleaned him up a bit and whisked him off to the medical station – we all hoped he’d be able to carry on, but I checked his number in the results later and it looks like he was forced to retire, which must have been an awful disappointment. We then braved the crowds and public transport to get to Trafalgar square to meet Dave and hand over his post-race beers.
