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

Bank Holiday Monday saw the traditional open-topped bus parade for Ipswich Town’s promotion to the Premier League. I’m not bothered about football, but was tempted to head down to meet Dave, Sally, Rob, Jo and Neil for a quick glimpse before what I expected to be lunch and a few pints in the Cricketers. As it turned out, this dragged on into the evening, followed by an additional stop at the Fat Cat on the way home. Even Neil, who until recently was rarely seen drinking more than the odd half, ended up having five pints – apparently the most he’s had since being a teenager.

Despite that, I managed to get up and cycle to work on Tuesday, then also cycle to Felixstowe and back for club training in the evening. I went out for a solo trail run on Wednesday evening (mostly missing the rain, but still getting soaked by oil seed rape plants either side of a narrow path, which were like wet sponges), then on Thursday evening I jogged out to Specsavers to finally pick up my latest pair of reading glasses (technically VDU glasses, which makes them free from work), and to vote on my way home. Sadly Suffolk County Council fell to reform, but Ipswich is still Labour-controlled for the moment.

I’m beginning to think the walkway outside our office may be cursed. When it was first built they (allegedly) put the decking planks on upside-down and it was almost immediately closed because it was slippery when wet. Then a few years later the rotting wooden surface was all replaced with plastic, and some time after that the steel frame was found to be rusting away, and last year the whole thing was removed and replaced with a raised concrete path.

This week we had an email saying the walkway is “temporarily closed due to an outbreak of caterpillars”.

Kafka is alive and well in our corporate IT processes. I got an email “escalating” the fact that I hadn’t reviewed registrations on the email relay service. Unfortunately (a) the “review” only allows you to confirm that an entry is still required, not indicate that it isn’t; (b) it says it’ll be disabled if I don’t review it by three weeks ago; and (c) because apps have four kinds of owner, and I’m all of them, the “escalation” involved CCing me three times on the email.

After Run for Coffee on Friday and parkrun on Saturday (obviously), I ran the Stephen Williams 10k on Sunday. I didn’t get too bad a time, what with it not being a fortnight after a marathon (last year) or the morning after the Twilight 5k (the year before). I still just about had enough energy to go out and cut my front hedge in the afternoon, before people start complaining about it encroaching on the pavement again.

Finally, we finished the week the way we started it, with dinner and slightly too much beer at the Cricketers again.

Sadly I lost Nobby cat this week. He’d been a bit frail for a while (he was about 18 – not sure exactly because he adopted us as a young cat in 2008 and stayed when his official owners moved away), and on Wednesday he lost interest in food and looked very sorry for himself. By the time I got home from work he was just lying on the bed. I was going to take him to the vet on Thursday morning, but he died at some point during the night. At least it seems like he went fairly peacefully, and in familiar surroundings, rather than spending his last few days on a drip in a cage at the vet’s.

The summer race season kicked off on Sunday with the Ipswich Twilight 5k. Like last year I was in the 17–21 minute wave, with a self-assigned target of just staying inside 21. Last year I managed 20:56, and this year … 20:55! Albeit this time I’d had three weeks to recover from a marathon rather than six days. After watching the ridiculously quick runners in the sub-17 wave we predictably headed to the Cricketers for a few too many beers in the garden.

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.

Typically, after the ridiculous winds on Sunday we woke up to a lovely still day on Monday, which would have been perfect marathon weather. After breakfast and tidying up we left the Airbnb and headed home. The roads were pretty quiet apart from being held up by a couple of tractors for a few miles, although as usual getting back across Ipswich seemed to take almost as long as the rest of the journey (I think we had to stop at all but one of the seemingly endless pedestrian crossings).

I managed to drag myself out for a very slow jog round the block to loosen my legs up (and to avoid leaving my year-to-date mileage sitting on 598.9), then cycled into town with Rob, Jo, Dave, Sally, Neil and Gill for dinner at the Marinero Lounge and a fairly inevitable few extra pints at the clubhouse. Fortunately the Real Ale Monday to Wednesday deal softened the blow of returning from the land of £2.20 pints to the Cricketers’ £2.99!

Back to work on Tuesday, then cycled out to Felixstowe with Rob, Jo, Dave, Neil and Ryan to show off our marathon T-shirts and/or medals before ignoring the actual training session in favour of food, beer and watching Ipswich Town lose to Portsmouth at the Grosvenor. The vague plan had been to put our bikes on the train for the journey home, but once Ryan realised there were no trains between 9.28 and 11.01 everyone was convinced to ride home too. Somehow this all got a bit competitive, with Strava telling me I had three segment PRs (the tailwind might have helped).

No respite from the beer on Wednesday, as it was time for the regular [ex-]BT meet-up at the Fat Cat, this time featuring Anders, Rupert, Tony and Dave F. Then on Thursday I finally had a free evening to relax (and to go to the supermarket to stock up my dwindling supplies of food).

I’d just finished my lunch on Friday when my phone buzzed with a reminder that my MOT test was in one hour, a fact I’d completely forgotten. The car sailed through for another year – probably not surprising as it had only travelled 1,650 miles since last year, which is slightly less than I’d run in the same time period.

I ran down to parkrun on Saturday, early enough to tag along with the course inspection again, then stopped off at the Cricketers (again) with the gang for a second breakfast. Then on Sunday I went out for a few miles in the sunshine round the Fynn Valley. No sign of my friendly sheep, but its friends seem to have taken over the bench in the field.

Marathon week! A fair-sized gang of us from FRR travelled up to Boston (Lincolnshire, not Massachusetts) for the festival of running, with most of us running the marathon and Steve the half. A bunch of us had booked an Airbnb close to the town centre together, and went up on Friday afternoon. We were conveniently close to the Moon Under Water, so headed there to meet up with some others who were staying elsewhere for dinner and slightly more pints than intended. Then on Saturday we did a leisurely parkrun before some of us heading back to the pub for second breakfast/lunch (but no beer this time). Then we all piled into the Stump and Candle, so everyone (even Glen and I, with our lack of interest in football) could watch the Ipswich/Norwich derby. Some beer was drunk, but only Guinness 0.0 this time. Most of us couldn’t be bothered with cooking, so returned later to the Spoons a third time for dinner.

The race started at 8am, so there were lots of early nights had on Saturday, all hoping the weather forecast would miraculously change from force 5 winds with force 7 gusts (it didn’t). Then an early start for everyone to get breakfast and make all those nervous extra trips to the toilet, but at least we only had a five minute jog across the river to the start line.

I started with Holly, and we ran the first 23 or so miles together, which made for a much more enjoyable experience. The initial 11 or so were with the wind behind us, but then once we’d started heading back in there were some pretty brutal headwinds in places. Fortunately the route was fairly winding, so it wasn’t just a solid half marathon into the wind, and I think most of us managed to keep the pace up much better than we’d expected. I certainly did a better job in the later stages than I did last year in London, when the problem was heat rather than wind. Holly’s knee started hurting with about three miles to go, then she got a stitch, and insisted I shouldn’t wait. At that point based on my average pace I was still more-or-less on target for my original optimistic 3:30 target, but that was clearly never going to be possible with the majority of that average made up of the early miles on fresh legs with a tailwind. I knew I was pretty much guaranteed a PB by that point though, which was motivation to try not to slow too much, and I even found myself thinking “well this proves I should be able to go under 3:30 next time if the conditions are better” in the last mile, which is a bit early to have already gone back on the traditional “never again”! I wasn’t far off, crossing the line in 3:31:07 (Holly wasn’t that far behind in the end). A surprising number of us came away with PBs, and Neil and Ryan both had great marathon debuts. Then, once everyone was in, those of us who weren’t travelling home on the day hobbled back for showers and yet another visit to the pub – this time with no reason to limit the number of beers!

A quarter of the way through the year already, which seems almost as unlikely as being more than a quarter of the way through the century. It’s beginning to almost feel like Spring too, and the lighter evenings are nice despite my general antipathy towards daylight saving time.

I watched the last of the Columbos. I hadn’t realised that the ”season 10” specials lasted sporadically until 2003, meaning that despite starting in 1971 the show almost outlived Buffy.

Another short work week, with Monday and Tuesday off as well as the bank holiday on Friday. Not that I got many useful tasks achieved in my time off, naturally! I did manage to accidentally contribute to reducing energy use by (a) making a flask of coffee for work on Thursday with cold water after forgetting to boil the kettle, and (b) having marmalade on bread instead of toast on Saturday after absent-mindedly buttering it after slicing instead of putting it in the toaster.

First week of marathon taper, so less running this week, but that did include the Sudbury Fun Run on Good Friday. I managed to be only one second slower than last year (Or a 0.58 percentage point improvement in age grade, as us old folks like to say).

I made hot “cross” buns again, for the nth year in a row. I didn’t think they came out as well as last year’s – I used the Dairy Book of Home Cookery recipe, forgetting that last time I followed one I’d found online – but they went down well with everyone after Friday’s race and parkrun on Saturday.

More days off this week (Wednesday afternoon onwards, which along with Monday and Tuesday next week will pretty much use up my remaining holiday before the new leave year starts in April). Not done a huge amount with them so far, other than a few hours hacking down an embarrassingly large amount of brambles from the back garden.

It’s also the last big week before starting to taper for the marathon in two weeks, and I somehow ended up doing a total of 60 miles – my highest weekly mileage for over three years.

Holly and I got our long run over on Friday as we both happened to be off work. We did a fairly random 20 mile trail loop, and encountered a woman walking a donkey (sadly too surprised to ask whether she minded me taking a photo), and later a remarkably friendly sheep.

In classic slapstick moment on Wednesday, I was loading up the bread maker when my watch buzzed with a notification. I turned my hand to read it, forgetting that I had an open packet of yeast in my hand until I felt it pouring onto my foot.
I finished playing Fallen Order, and have started on Neva. So far it feels a bit more linear than Gris, which I stopped partway through feeling like I was missing where I was supposed to go (and then figured I’d have forgotten the mechanics and would have to start from scratch).

Monthly Fat Cat meet-up again on Wednesday (that seems to have come round fast!), with Tony, Mel, Dave F and Joe. Plenty of random conversation, ranging from woodwork to the evils of “AI”.

In a short interlude from this blog consisting solely of weeknotes, I wrote up the process of narrowing down and eliminating a performance bottleneck in some code at work.

I took Friday (and next Monday) off, in a desperate attempt to use up my remaining leave before the end of March. I started the day with a before-breakfast cycle over to the Ravenswood medical centre for another blood test, as they’d recommended a fasting test to get more accurate cholesterol numbers before giving me statins. Just like the last two appiontments at the doctor’s, this was extremely efficient – my appointment was at 8.30, and I was back out by 8.32. Then a plumber came round to see if he could spot my water leak. Unfortunately he couldn’t, and is now going to arrange for someone else to come round with actual leak-detection kit, which is what I had thought was happening this time. Oh well.

Plenty of running this week, with only one more big week to go before the marathon taper starts. Club on Tuesday, then ran to work on Wednesday (and back via the route with the new toucan crossing where you get to stop traffic on the A12), followed by a steady-paced Thursday Tempo Ten with Neil (not far behind Dave, Al and Gripper, who were also taking it easy but going slightly faster than agreed!). I decided to give the Colchester 15 on Sunday a miss, as it seemed daft to pay £25 to run round slowly, probably on my own, and got my long run done on Saturday with about 20 miles including parkrun in the middle, and company from Holly and Maria. That left me a couple of miles short of 50 for the week, so I couldn’t resist a little plod round the common on Sunday to make up the extra.

I’ve been playing Star Wars: Fallen Order, which is basically Tomb Raider with light sabers, but is enjoyable enough (on easy mode because I can’t be bothered with constantly retrying fights). The sequel’s in the Steam sale at the moment, but the general consensus seems to be that it doesn’t play well on the Steam Deck. I did pick up Neva at half price though – I’ve been keeping an eye out for it to be on sale after enjoying (but npt actually finishing) Gris.

I’ve nearly finished watching all the Columbos, and just reached the bizarre No Time To Die, which completely abandons the standard formula, doesn’t have a murder, and is actually an Ed McBain 87th Precinct story in disguise. Apparently there’s another one in the same vein coming up. Oh, just one more thing …

Rounded off the week with a Sunday evening visit to the Cricketers for food and a few beers with Rob & Jo, Dave & Sally, Neil & Gill and (briefly) Ryan and Claire.

Back to the Spread Eagle on Wednesday for the quiz. We came joint third out of seven or eight teams, so very much mid-table, but it was a fun night out anyway.

I spent some time hacking my way through the vegetation that had overgrown the passage round the side of my house, to the extent that it’s now possible to walk round that way. This was mainly to see whether I could find any evidence of where the water pipe to the garage goes, but no luck on that front. Looks like I’ll have to get a professional in to sniff out the leak.

To Stowupland on Sunday for the Stowmarket half marathon. I think I’ve finally come out the other side of the cold that I’d been suffering with for a few weeks, but still wasn’t sure how well I was likely to go. The weather would have been perfect if it hadn’t been for the force four wind. We knew it was going to be behind us for most of the first half, then in our faces on the way back, which is also the hilliest bit, and sure enough it was very much a game of two halves. I set off with Holly and Maria, at a quicker pace than I’d intended, and spent the first ten miles or so wondering how long I was going to be able to keep up. Then somehow I managed to get a second wind at around mile ten, and it was Holly that dropped back first, then Maria (so much for youth and carbon shoes!). I ended up with a slightly quicker time than in 2024, which I see I described at the time as “OK but not great”. I’m two years older now though, and may have lowered my expectations a bit!

As is traditional, some of us stopped at the Willow Tree for lunch on the way home. It was my turn to drive, so I got to sample Guinness 0.0 for the first time. It does a pretty passable impression of normal Guinness, although I wouldn’t say that’s a massively high bar.

Once again it feels like more stuff must have happened, but that’s all I can think of.