• Thursday, 28 Nov 2024 9:56 pm

  Now

  I haven’t done one of these in a while. Haven’t written much lately. I haven’t made time for it; it hasn’t felt important. I haven’t quite felt myself lately, and one of the first things that gets cut when I’m in Survival Mode is self-reflection (which is pretty much the whole point of this website). Also on that list: joy in music. When I find myself doomscrolling through my music library I know that I’m having Another One of Those Days.

  I suspect it’s the time of year. I get terrible hay fever in the fall (or, I don’t know, generic hay-fever-adjacent sinusitis), and this year has been worse than usual. Since the clocks have gone back, we only get about an hour of useable sunlight during the day — from noon onwards the sun is still technically present but its attention is elsewhere.

  It occurs to me that I never wrote about the Loch Ness Marathon, which I ran at the end of September. It was a stunning day in a stunning part of the country. But the wheels came off just after the halfway mark, and I hobbled the second half at a walking pace.

  

  

  Since then I just haven’t had much motivation. My running history has perhaps overindexed on Long & Slow runs, so I’ve been working on speed in an attempt to shake something loose. My running form has improved a bit, and I put up a good showing at the Brampton to Carlisle 10 mile race a couple weeks ago. I like that distance, and I like the carbo-loading pretext for scarfing an entire box of flapjack at once.

  Still working towards a 20-minute 5k before the end of the year.

  Around the house we’ve been checking more jobs off the list, with the goal of starting 2025 with a fresh slate. Our latest: there are now nice plush carpet runners on the stairs, replacing some awful tatty beige stuff that the house was assembled with back in 2008 or so. In a year of tiling, wallpapering, and carpeting, I like carpeting the best: it’s relatively tidy work and you can mask a lack of experience with a surfeit of staples. would carpet again.

  

  

  

  For Sam’s birthday the other week, we both took some time off and enjoyed ourselves in the (admittedly meagre) sunlight while the rest of the world toiled at their desks. We went to a fancy breakfast in Durham with the retirees and the posh students, then took a tour of the Cathedral (no tower climb, unfortunately—under renovation) and castle buildings. We spent a day at Beamish and visited the new 1950s town; John’s Café is now open after having languished here on Wingate Front Street for years.

  

  

  

  

  At the end of the week we made a chilly trip to the Lake District for a run with Ghyll across a couple peaks of the Helvellyn ridge. Clouds rolled in on us along the very tops, but on the hillsides we had wonderful solitary views over Grasmere.

  

  

  

  I’ve just returned from a walk with Ghyll. It has been dark for hours (approximately 5) and the thermometer has dropped sufficiently that puddles are freezing over. In the field near our house Ghyll sauntered into the dark, from whence little crunching noises emerged at intervals as he wandered around in the tall, frozen grass. When we got home I had dinner and he curled up on the sofa.

  now Ghyll Running

• ---

  Tuesday, 20 Aug 2024 11:16 pm

  Now

  

  It’s been a minute: time to reconsolidate. What have I been up to lately.

  The Olympics...

  ...were on. I have good memories of watching the Tokyo Olympics 3 years ago, so we dropped £6 on Discovery+ so that we could watch the catchups at the end of the day, or watch the full versions of high-profile events like the cycling time trials or triathlons or athletics. The announcers on Discovery+ weren’t quite as good as I remember the BBC ones being.

  I love the spirit and the aesthetics of the Olympics: people of all backgrounds coming together in one place to show everyone else just how good they are at stuff. I'm not bothered by the endless firehose of People Are Amazing YouTube videos that seem to be published at a rate of several lifetimes of footage per day, but I will get out of bed (or, more likely, not get into bed) for the Olympics every time.

  Right on schedule, the Internet Content Hot Take Machine spooled up to produce a boatload of dumb Olympics opinions, and right on schedule I loaded up my internet browser to consume and scoff at them. I don’t have a ton to say about any of it except for that I agree with the proposal to hold the Games in the same place every year. Pick a summer spot (probably Greece) and a winter spot (I don’t know) and just have them there every year.

  Running

  

  Some progress on the running front. Conscious that it’s not particularly interesting to hear the news of someone’s work-in-progress, but I’ve mostly shaken free of the knee troubles that bothered me throughout the summer and I’m back on a running plan that at least temporarily nudges me into the “Productive” status on my Garmin. If the app says it’s progress, then it’s progress!

  Here is a complaint about Jack White

  I listened to a lot of The White Stripes in university, but when he went off to do his own thing and swapped all of his red t-shirts for blue ones I sort of tuned out. Apparently he’s been doing some critically-panned stuff since then, I don’t know. Anyway he’s got a new album out and it’s return-to-form-adjacent, mostly big licks.

  I think I read Jack White described as having “beaten all of the levels of real-life Guitar Hero” somewhere and I thought that was accurate.

  I listened through the new album on a run recently and I can’t help but feel like Jack White has the same kind of naive righteousness that John Lennon gives off. But like where John Lennon would say things like, “Give peace a chance,” or “All you need is love,” as if tapping a deep well of morality, Jack White says things like, “I’m backseat driving when you’re driving me crazy / But I can’t drive a stick,” as if tapping a deep well of cool. I like the sounds he makes with a guitar but I have to force myself not to listen to the words.

  And here is a complaint about Siri

  I don’t have the right silicon to get Apple Intelligence™ whenever it comes out, so I’m stuck with Vanilla Siri. Siri is very good for setting timers and adding things to the Groceries list and getting directions back to my house and occasionally for getting directions to a postcode if I have the patience to try three or four times.

  Sometimes I find new things that Siri can do, as when I asked it recently to put on “the latest Decemberists album” and it correctly starts playing As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.

  Other times,

  —Hey Siri, play a random album from my library.
  —Okay, what would you like to play?
  —A random album.
  —Here’s what I found for ‘a random album’ on the web.

  I don’t know how after so many years it continues to be quite this bad.

  Counting calories

  I’ve started counting calories with an app called Lose It. I don’t know if I want to Lose It. But I want to be a little bit more deliberate about what I eat: I spent much of my training for the Fellsman just shoving back whole bags of sweets and McDonald’s on top of my regular meals and while I don’t think it’s done me irrevocable harm, I just know that one day in my forties I’m going to wake up and rue the quantities of sugar that I consumed when I was younger.

  Anyway, the whole thing has been an instructive exercise in the sheer volume of calories that Asda seems to be able to squeeze into e.g. muffins, jellybeans, yogurt bars. I don’t know how they do it.

  Back outdoors

  After we got Ghyll, we sort of put wild camping on hold while he grew up and settled down a bit. Now he’s a bit grown up and a bit settled down, and we’ve busted the tent and sleeping bags back out for a couple of overnight walks through the countryside.

  

  

  It’s gone well: it turns out that traipsing 20 kilometres across heath and moor puts a real Weariness into the bones of a mutt with an unslakable enthusiasm for such things. As a result he’s quite happy to curl up in a corner of the tent (usually the corner where we have heaped the sleeping bags to fluff up) while we cook dinner and settle in for the night.

  The first night, in the Lakes, we only brought the flysheet and slept on a thin Polycryo groundsheet, which was a mistake: torrential rain descended while we slept, and I awoke to a Morning Dampness in the Sleeping Bag. This past weekend in the Cheviots we brought the full tent and he slept through the night with nary a bother. Plus I woke up dry.

  The prospect of further nights in the wilderness ahead and another (admittedly farty) body in the tent to keep us warm through the lingering dark makes the upcoming winter marginally more bearable.

  now Running Ghyll

• ---

  Thursday, 16 May 2024 7:09 pm

  Now

  Trying to keep on top of this.

  

  Fellsman recovery is going well. My knee isn't quite as sore as it was last week. I attribute it almost totally to this video from David and Jelena Yoga, which seems to be just about the right balance of stretching vs. not spending an entire evening on it.

  I went back to my running club for the first time in like months, yesterday. I chatted briefly with a friend who attempted the Bob Graham Round a few weeks ago, but who was forced to abandon the attempt due to bad weather. She told me that she's not thinking about doing it again: that it's such a massive commitment and it's not just physically but emotionally draining, and that she's just looking forward to getting back to running for the enjoyment of it. A lot of what she said makes sense to me.

  

  We've been out to a couple of shows hosted by Zoe—the first a longer, more traditional gig; the second ostensibly a pub quiz as a pretext as for looser, more improvisational comedy. The gig I enjoyed, but the quiz was a much better platform for the kind of comedy that Zoe excels at: intimate, engaging, tangential. We brought Sam's dad and his partner to the quiz and we had a hoot.

  What else? We had a couple days of unbroken sunshine during which I opened up the app for measuring the output of our solar panels and ogled the kilowatt-hours basically ad nauseam. I get a kick out of this stuff. Ghyll spent a couple hours over at his friend's house while we were at one of the gigs and apparently he was totally manageable, which is impressive! He's certainly coming on by leaps and bounds. And if you know Ghyll you know that he can leap and bound with the best of em.

  now Running Ghyll

• ---

  Tuesday, 14 May 2024 9:09 am

  Ghyll update

  I haven't written much lately about Ghyll, the dog who's been living in our house for the past two years or so. He continues to be full of beans, but as he approaches his second birthday, his beans are being directed in somewhat of a more deliberate direction.

  

  Since having most of his tail amputated at the end of the year (and the long recovery process that entailed), he hasn't had any other health trouble. He's eaten some really awful stuff out on walks, but it hasn't had any ill effects on him, either in the short- or long-term.

  He's made a fast friend in a golden retriever, Bailey, from down the street, and they hang out a couple times per week and tire each other out. It's very sweet to see how he's made a friend—Bailey clearly likes him as well, and pulls towards our house when his owner walks by our street. Dog friendship is funny.

  It's not all just socialisation, either: we can leave him at home for a few hours in the evening, provided he's had enough exercise during the day and we leave sufficiently late that he can plausibly conk out for the night. But we have fewer and fewer reasons to leave him at home in the evening, because he's slowly becoming a well-behaved pub dog. He doesn't truly relax unless he's been out for a nice long run, but he does stay generally out of the way and accepts passing pats from pubgoers with equanimity (i.e.: he doesn't try to chew their sleeves).

  I enjoy watching him mature, and I enjoy the extra peace that it brings: Ghyll is slowly changing from a responsibility to a companion. I don't think that I foresaw this coming, but I can tell you that I'm very pleased that it's (and he's!) here.

  Ghyll

• ---

  Saturday, 7 Oct 2023 11:19 am

  Ghyll's shorter tail

  Some country fairs have dog shows. Most of the time, these are shows of obedience, or of agility, or of simple breeding. But some fairs have "tail-wagging-est dog" shows, where owners compete to rile their dog up into such a frenzy of excitement that they wag their tail harder and faster than any of their dog peers.

  We've long suspected that Ghyll would fare well in one of these competitions. His shot at being a contender, however, has been cut short (this pun is intended but won't make sense until the end of this paragraph) before it even began. This is because Ghyll wagged his tail so hard that he injured the tip of it—so badly, in fact, that he had to have the last 2 inches of it amputated.

  

  Given that this occurred at the same time as he was castrated, he's taking it surprisingly well! He's still wagging his tail with abandon, much to his owners' (and his veterinarians') chagrin. We've been advised to maintain as quiet and calm an atmosphere as we can. Ghyll oscillates between self-pity and unbridled joy—he's resting more, but he's basically still the same dog. I'm grateful for that.

  Ghyll

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