2024

Here we are again. It’s been a busy December and in the wind-down days the house has been dim and quiet and I’ve had a chance to reflect on everything that happened this year. It’s been a full one as usual, but it’s also been characterised by a series of missed expectations and malfunctions that we’ve done a poor job of staying on top of.

Winter

January started with a fizzle. We’d decided to undertake some house work (replacing worn laminate with tiles, refurbishing the downstairs bathroom) but the work was slow going and we struggled to motivate ourselves to actually knuckle down and do it. The result was that, for much of the winter, parts of the house remained sort of semi-furbished.

We were no luckier on the automotive front; our daily driver started producing problems from nowhere and we struggled to keep the Porsche that we’d bought at the end of last year running reliably. We did do some light maintenance work, but kept getting rebuffed by bad weather: driving wind, piercing chill, endless days of rain. The waterlogged fields we took Ghyll roiled like rough sea at our feet.

Neither could I find solace in books: after finishing Jon Fosse’s bleak Trilogy I spent the following 5 months trying to fight my way through Dhalgren on a decade-old recommendation. This book broke me. I spent much of the rest of the year trying to rediscover why I read in the first place.

I found a bright spot in running at the weekend in preparation for the Fellsman, a challenge I decided to undertake back in 2023 but which I didn’t write about in my previous annual recap. I planned a few really nice runs through the North York Moors and in the Yorkshire Dales over the weekends, and enjoyed every minute of them. Not so enjoyable, however, were the increasingly long weekly runs during the week: dark half marathons undertaken with Ghyll after work that kept me away from home for hours and hours at a time. In late January one of these long runs aggravated a longstanding strain injury and I wound up not running at all for a few weeks—which was maybe just as bad as running too much. Only the frequent application of extended stretching exercises made any difference.

In February we had solar panels installed at the house, to nearly no immediate effect—in February the sun is weak and thin if it comes out at all. Still, it was exciting to watch the current flow through our house and percolate on savings to come.

Later on in the month we decided to give ourselves a break and flew to southern Spain for a long weekend at a family member’s villa. I can take or leave Spain as a country, but the trip was just what Sam and I needed at the time: an opportunity to neglect our responsibilities at home and spend some time together in the sun.

Spring

February turned to March and a faint blueness returned to the sky in the last minutes of my workday. Light was, gradually, returning to the North East of England. This coincided with an increase in weekly mileage ahead of the Fellsman in an attempt to make up for missed training during my injury recovery period. If I’m honest, I don’t remember a lot of March and April: I ran nearly constantly, through forest and across fell, traversing ancient trackway and erstwhile railway, under and over bridges, through mine workings, past pubs and holiday cottages. Many of these were truly lovely runs, but so engrossed was I in trying to stick to my training plan that I don’t think I really appreciated them at the time. I was constantly on the internet looking up ultrarunning race reports, rereading mandatory kit lists, packing and unpacking my running backpack in anticipation. The whole season was unhealthy: I was burnt out on running.

In March we received a bothy report indicating that someone had knocked a hole in the flue of the stove at Haughtongreen, so we went out to investigate: it turned out that someone had simply misplaced the hatch cover for sweeping the flue (it was later found hanging from the ceiling). This whole saga—investigating the hole, measuring for some repair, finding the hatch cover—took a couple of weeks to puzzle out.

At length, British Summer Time began and the days suddenly got much brighter. Fellsman training wound up and then it was time for the race itself. After the ordeal of training, the race itself almost seemed like an anticlimax—especially given quite how much of the race I wound up walking due to a tendon issue in my left knee. In the days and weeks after the race I continued with some light running but couldn’t motivate myself to take it seriously; as a result I suffered during a pacing run for a friend’s Bob Graham attempt a few weeks later.

Summer

Summer rolled in without fanfare, a scattered handful of sunny days and warmish temperatures. On these days the solar panels kicked into overdrive and we wound up generating far more than we could produce. Still, the projects that we’d undertaken over the previous six months continued only in fits and starts.

The tiling that we’d gotten started with back in January remained unfinished—the tiles had been laid, but we didn’t get around to applying the grout until May. Once the grout had set, we discovered that the grout clings to the natural stone floor tiles we used, and had to spend a couple more weekends on hands and knees scraping grout residue—followed by the relatively easy but time-consuming process of painting and installing new skirting boards. But by midsummer, the flooring work was (mostly) complete.

Around this time as well, the Porsche sort of conked out, cutting out and refusing to restart. I suspect that it has something to do with the fuel system, but I haven’t gotten back around to properly diagnosing it, even today. With everything else going on, we also neglected to take the motorbike back out for a ride; the expiration of our Compulsory Basic Training certificates in May put the kibosh on any further riding over the summer.

At the end of May, we jetted off to the States for a week to celebrate my sister’s engagement party. We’d been away from the family for a year and it was wonderful to get to celebrate with them, even briefly. We spent most of the time in the pool and stopped in Atlanta on the way home for some awesome barbecue. Back in the UK I started counting down the days until we returned for the wedding proper in December.

Another couple of weeks, another trip—this time to France on a motorhoming expedition. I’d originally planned to participate in a sprint triathlon in Chantilly, but I’d done no training in the pool or on the bike up to this point and decided to skip it and loiter around in the Ardennes with Sam and Ghyll and fancy beer and cheese instead. In retrospect this was definitely for the best.

We whiled away the rest of the summer on short walks and runs with Ghyll. Later on in the summer we even took Ghyll wild camping a couple of times, the first time we’d been out in the wilderness with him overnight. Over the past year, he’s either calmed down a lot or we’ve gotten better at identifying and avoiding his triggers. I can’t tell which.

Autumn

As the summer faded into autumn, we were back up at the bothy to finish up some jobs—painting, tidying, splicing a doorframe, clearing out some overgrown nettles. We left the bothy in good shape for the winter ahead.

I also ramped up my running again, this time in preparation for the Loch Ness Marathon. The first few weeks of training went well, but a trip down to the office in Leeds shook my schedule up, and then Sam and I were struck down with covid—and in the end I never really wound up getting back into the swing of things. By the time that the marathon came around, I didn’t think that I was in particularly bad shape—but poor sleep and nutrition caught up with me and the wheels came off halfway through. I wound up missing my target pace by like half an hour and came home from Inverness pretty bummed.

At work, we completed a long-running project to transition from an old system to a new one. I also spearheaded a project to modernise the UI of an internal application, addressing a bunch of accessibility and experience issues—which felt like progress! I can tell, however, that I’m moving into a period in my career where I no longer really care about What’s Going On in JavaScript. I’ve spent a not-inconsiderable amount of the last seven-ish years trying to keep up with the meta, listening to podcasts and following blogs, wondering whether I should lean more into producing Web Development Content—but I just don’t care anymore. Liberating.

Around the time that the clocks went back, Sam and I, along with her dad and his partner, started volunteering with a local Scouts group in Hartlepool. It’s been a fun way to get involved in mentorship for kids, though I feel like we haven’t quite had enough time to properly make a difference yet. More to come in 2025.

At the end of November, Sam and I took some time off for her birthday and we did some local sightseeing, including a tour of Durham Cathedral, a night out at a fancy restaurant, a day at Beamish, and a walk with Ghyll in the snowy hills of the Lake District. There's so much to see and do in our little corner of the country, and we'd spent so much of the year in our home or out on running trails in the dark that giving ourselves the space to enjoy a week without expectations was expectedly refreshing.

Winter again

And so it started getting cold again, and dark. Since the Loch Ness Marathon I’d decided to focus on more speed work in my running, to positive results at the Brampton to Carlisle road race and at the one cross country fixture I’ve made it to.

With the prospect of a full December looming, we made one last push to finish the projects that we started at the beginning of the year: stripping the remaining adhesive spillage from the tile floor, fitting the remaining hardware in the bathroom, laying carpet runners on the stairs, sorting out the bedroom where, in a few short weeks, dad and his partner would be coming to visit.

Before that, however—a return to the United States, for my sister’s wedding in south Georgia. We flew into Florida and celebrated an early Christmas with my family before heading up to Georgia for the wedding at a stunning hunting lodge (with stunning taxidermy). The whole wedding weekend was magical and transportive, an interlude in a world away from the last year. I found myself unexpectedly sorrowful on our departure—whereas much of 2024 didn’t quite go my way, I felt (and feel) that my family has grown a lot closer over the last year in a way that’s surprised and touched me.

We had only a couple of days back home before dad and his partner showed up in the UK to visit for a few days. We spent most of the time in the pub, but managed to get out for Christmas dinner with Sam’s family and for a walk up Roseberry Topping on what turned out to be the capstone of a spectacular week, weather-wise (and experience-wise).

And so it goes

It’s a dark December night once again. The years are passing with increasing speed, and I feel I’m struggling to keep hold of them. I find myself looking back on the way I’ve changed, the differences I’ve made, the people I’ve impacted, in a way that I didn’t think I would until I was in my 40s, at least. These questions of, How have I changed? or Whose lives have I touched? or What difference have I made in the world? are middle-aged person questions—I'm not middle-aged yet, right? The past year wasn’t bad—but the prospect of another string of years like this one, another forty or so, doesn’t excite me. I feel that something needs to change in 2025.

Previously: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023