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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.
It helps to try running interesting places... 
...and ensure as many runs as possible end with a pint 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.
The gaffer admires the handiwork 
John's Cafe as it is now... 
...and as it was 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.
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Got a couple of bellends living in our hedge It’s fall. There’s a light breeze up and the sky is patchy with windswept fluff carried to and fro before the sun, causing the brightness in the window to pulse gently every few minutes. The light has, over the course of a single week, adopted the watery faraway look that it will retain for the next six or seven months. I can see Daylight Saving Time at the end of the street, going door to door with its pamphlets advocating Full British Darkness. Pretty soon it’ll be here. I double-check that the rechargeable batteries for my headlight are charged.
I picked up Ghyll’s poo and mowed the lawn yesterday. Put a load of laundry out but it’s just barely too chilly to dry clothes all the way through. Tidied up the kitchen. Made up a list of chores that I’m not likely to do. I like the orderly feeling of brisk weather.
I knelt down on the ground this morning and discovered that a cable had come undone under the car. I think it probably happened while we were driving through Wark Forest at the weekend. I remember going over a bump and hearing a bit of a bang. The Check Engine light came on a little after that, and the engine started giving off a new grumbling sort of sound. I’ve plugged the cable back in and cleared the engine fault codes. I wonder if it’ll come back. We may be in the market for a new connector. Doesn’t explain the grumbling, though. I’ll get the car up on jacks at some point and see if I’ve knocked a hole in the exhaust. That would be a pain.
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I’ve just recovered from a quick bout of covid. I think about covid probably less than I should. People are still out there getting covid all of the time, and some of them are getting really ill. It knocked me on my bottom pretty good. But a full day’s rest bookended with gratuitous, sweaty fever dreams was enough to break its hold in my case. I’m fascinated by the metrics my watch recorded throughout: elevated heartrate, depressed heart rate variability. My Stress Score was abysmal, and my Body Battery was pretty much empty for three days. Technology can be a marvel. I give covid
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Big man also got a haircut Sam and I watched a couple of seasons of Clarkson’s Farm recently and now we’re scrolling Zillow listings for smallholdings in the Pennines and the Borders. Twenty acres would do us. Twenty acres for a cow or two, maybe a goat. A shed to keep the car in, maybe some freeweights or a treadmill. Abutting open access land, close proximity to singletrack. I don’t want to be a farmer, but I want to live on a farm.
When we ran out of episodes of Clarkson’s Farm we went back to catch up on The Grand Tour. I can see why Clarkson has elected to stop doing it. It’s clear that the three of them just aren’t into reviewing cars anymore. That’s fair. Cars are pretty much all the same now, with minor variations. You can only say, “Please look at this 700-horsepower supercar with a Mercedes-AMG engine,” so many different ways.
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More tiling this weekend. From here on out I’m going to do my utmost never to tile another surface in my life. I expect this resolution will last maybe 4 months. for the work, for the result.
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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.
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Now
Back from France and settling in for the rest of the summer. I was expecting long days with the windows open; what I got was scattered thunderstorms and 9 degrees Celsius. Grab your sweaters.
Since the Fellsman, running has been sporadic. I tweaked my knee during the event, and while I'm not hobbling or anything, I've been dealing with a variety of knee sorenesses since then that have kept me from putting in the miles. At the same time, I think I'm still stuck in the mental frame of running for hours at a time. So I've been going short runs that don't satisfy during the week, and then log runs that mess up my hips and knees at the weekend. I just need to get back into a regular schedule, even out the training load, and make another appointment with my one yoga YouTube video.
Beyond that, it's been pretty quiet around here. We're trying to make a push on finishing the projects that we've got started around the house: the tiles that we started in January (!), a doorframe that's rotting away a bit, the wardrobe upstairs. Trying to get properly back into reading after the slog that was Dhalgren. The long days are a boon, but the crummy weather has put a damper on our attitudes.
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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.
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