Latest posts

• Saturday, 23 May 2026 11:55 am

  The 62nd Fellsman

  Some notes on the 62nd running of the Fellsman in 2026. I’m not going to be quite as extensive as I was last time.

  Arrival is, I think, better this time around: the various checks and check-ins are spread out over a couple of different stations, so while the total queueing time is about the same, the time in each individual queue is a bit shorter. Some queuing indoors: I kick my bag for life and my duffel down the hallway under the students’ presentations on the history of exploration and the scientific method.

  Over supper, I chat with a lady running the Dart, and then hang around sipping a hot drink while a guy who’d run Western States back in the day regales us with tales of Fellsmans gone by. Then I go back to the hall and blow up my mattress and pack my bag and brush my teeth and go straight to sleep. Two years ago, I'd really struggled to get much sleep at all. This time round, I bring the Good Pillow from home and sleep like a baby through the snoring and the shuffling on crinkly sleeping pads and wake up feeling like a million bucks at 4:45 in the morning, maybe for the first time in my life.

  Break fast on oats; a last personal kit check; meet up with a couple of other Striders running the race to catch the bus to Ingleton. David and Nina have both completed the Bob Graham Round. I wonder how many other people on the bus have — or will, based on today's result. I chat with a guy called Tom as the bus moves in and out of the rising sun. Tom will run about the same pace as me for much of the race but will literally disappear into the sunset later today and I’ll never see him again.

  

  It feels like there’s less loiter time at the community centre in Ingleton. I clip my number to my backpack and take my fleece off and we meet with Strider Tom and take some pictures outside. Soon we're all hustled down onto the cricket pitch for the last rites. Some kind of weird siren plays to indicate that the race has started but no one understands what it is and the organisers all scream “Go! It’s started, go!” over each other until the crowd disperses in approximately 6 different directions.

  Ingleborough and Whernside are much easier this time around: I purposely run at a leisurely pace. Slow is smooth etc. etc. I fuss with my pack coming down Ingleborough and then drop back from David to take a leak behind a wall, but catch him back up on the jaunt towards Whernside.

  There's a topless guy doing hill reps on Whernside's flank. He has maybe -2% body fat. I say “well done” when he clatters down past me and he says, “I get to go home after this, well done you!” Next time he comes by I say to all of my fellow competitors, “Heads up, here comes Hercules,” and it gets a laugh.

  

  

  The first time I feel the exertion is on the descent into Kingsdale, long and bruising on the quads and followed up by the steep climb to Gregareth. Maybe my least favourite. The sun starts to burn.

  David and I make good time across to Great Coum at a plod. Plod is David’s word but it sticks in my head for the rest of the day. Then down into Dent: a good jaunt on the maps but gone before I know it. I smugly spot the secret shortcut over to the campground. We spend 15 minutes at Dent shovelling clementines into our faces.

  

  The road section is blissfully shady but soon we’re out on the long climb up the Craven Way. The deviation down to the entrance of the Blea Moor Tunnel is frustrating: we descend forever and then struggle to determine quite how much further we need to go before we’re permitted to turn back on ourselves for the climb up to Blea Moor itself. By the time we get to the stark white trig point (“Is it true you repaint the trig point every year?” “What do you think?”) both of us are out of water in the hottest part of the day. I'm loading electrolyte capsules into my face at a rate of knots but they don't stave off the rising cramp in my calves.

  

  It’s a long struggle down to Stone House; I arrive in a daze and mild panic and gulp down water and flat, lukewarm cola and then immediately break out into a thick sweat. Was I not sweating just now? I feel nauseous so I eat a couple of bananas and a gel and a knockoff twix bar and then we start climbing to Great Knoutberry. I am terribly jealous of David’s poles; I tune into the backs of his shoes and zone out and we plod up and up.

  By the time I get to the summit of Great Knoutberry I’m feeling a bit better, so we hustle down to Redshaw in decent time. The breeze has finally picked up and I’m not showing up to each next aid station with no water — although there’s still no electrolyte at Redshaw. I fill up with lime cordial but it lacks the tang of suspended salt. As if to underline the point I step with both feet into a bog just past the checkpoint and both calves seize up and I go en pointe and topple and have to assume the sketchiest downward dog right there in the bog to ease the cramp.

  Pass Snaizeholm, on to Cam High Road and then up Dodd Fell. On the way down, we get confused about how to get back onto the road — we take the long way round but a bunch of folks behind us just clamber over the wall and cut ahead of us. Oh well. We are not the only ones to take the long way round.

  At Fleet Moss we all put our coats and layers on. The checkpoint marshal tells us to please turn on the red lights attached to our packs. Then down the long descent into Marsett as the light finally disappears. At a stile I pause and listen to the whooping of the curlews and the far-off caws of sundown crows. It’s quiet and the view northward is dark and hazy and lovely. The head torch goes on just as we approach the Marsett checkpoint by way of the garden of an empty cottage. The village is silent.

  Walk all the way up to Stake Moss with another fellow, called Matt I think. Steep at first, and loose underfoot; but when we hit the gravel track we get into a good marching rhythm. Just before Stake Moss I find a wristband on the ground and reunite it with its owner at the checkpoint itself. The descent to Cray isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and Cray doesn’t have the blaring music and disco ball from 2 years past. The warmth and light inside the tent makes climbing Buckden Pike a sorry prospect — but we force ourselves back into the dark.

  

  Crossing the road outside the checkpoint, I see a lone headtorch on the side of the mountain, swinging wildly around in the dark, far away from everyone else, and wonder dimly whether they’re in trouble. It looks so forlorn. Looking at the map afterwards I can only think that they followed the Pennine Journey towards Buckden and then had to turn back on themselves up the tourist track.

  We follow some guy up the right side of the gill on Buckden Pike: this is a path I’ve never tried before. Join with a pair of girls following him up the grassy hillside, but at a tall stone wall our leader puts on a burst of speed and disappears into the mists, so we have to find our own way through a gate and up to the gravel track. I feel remarkably fresh on the flags towards the top, notwithstanding the soles of my feet, the pain at once intense but also strangely easy to ignore.

  Walk the flagged section to the memorial cross and then shuffle down the soggy path to Top Mere in the dark. The fog closes in so I carry my headtorch in my hand for better visibility. Then my hand gets too cold and I put it back on my head for the walk/run along to Park Rash. For a section I remember as pretty much flat, there is a lot of climbing here. At the aid station we catch up with big a group of people but they all wind up leaving before us. Nina also shows up, looking harried — grabs a banana, dispenses a quick hug, and stalks back out into the night. I admire her clarity of purpose; we catch her back up near the top of Great Whernside.

  

  From there, we travel down the back of Great Whernside together, barely following the trod in the mist and the dark but making good progress across the peat hags above the disused mines. Just past the peat hags we start to catch another group (or the same one from earlier?) and I hustle to catch up with them. I move along at a plod with my arms swinging but don’t seem to be moving any faster than they are walking. After ten minutes I say something offhand to David and receive no response: on turning I find that Nina and he are just a pair of headlights bobbing in the mist behind me. As I can tell that they’re together, I continue on my own, past the group and into the lonesome dark, making good time down to Yarnbury. A group of kids are listening to Bo Burnham in good spirits, for 4am.

  I put headphones in and trundle down the hill. I can’t tell if the asphalt is any easier to run on than the grassy trods of the last 20 hours, but I pick up pace as I roll into Grassington. The streets are empty but I’m in very good humour. I even run up the last little hill towards the school.

  When I come around the corner at the finish line, a dark knee-high blur comes rushing at me, flying through the air in a spasm of legs and nerves. I suspect, briefly, that I’ve finally started hallucinating, but it turns out to just be Ghyll.

  Running The Fellsman

• ---

  Wednesday, 31 Dec 2025 6:40 pm

  2025

  I never know how long to make these things. So much happens in a year and then it gets to like 19:45 on New Year’s Eve, which is the time that it is right now, and I’ve got a bulleted list and a basketful of memories and a dread at how I’m going to make this clever or significant or remotely useful to me years hence.

  The only thing for it is to start typing and see where we get to. So here we go: a farewell to 2025.

  Winter

  I suspect that I could live out a thousand lifetimes in the North East of England and never really internalise how dark it gets here. We live in town! With streetlights and yobbos and dogwalkers with head torches, but everyday the sky fades from black to dark grey around 9:00 and then fades back to black at like 15:30. I live in the interstices between lamps. One day we’ll move out to the countryside and I’ll go fully nocturnal. But not in 2025, and probably not in 2026 either.

  Sam and I started off 2025 in the dark: a trip up to Flittingford for a chilly night with Ghyll. We popped out of the bothy at the late hour of 18:30 to find a full aurora blazing over the pines. An auspicious start to the year. Then Ghyll ate some human poo that a previous resident ungenerously left just on the other side of the sheepfold.

  

  

  Back on the home front I knuckled down and finished a couple of projects around the house: tiles in the back room, a slow-draining kitchen sink. Rode my bike to Durham to get the train down into the office a couple times. The dark is not so bad when you have a 2000-lumen headlight on your bicycle.

  In the evenings I binge-watched videos about how large language models worked and idly submitted job applications hither and yon. Submitting job applications that you don’t care about that much feels like work but in retrospect I don’t think it is. Or at least it wasn’t work to me. I didn’t hear back with a positive result from a single one.

  

  

  

  This coincided with a spell of cold weather and a snow that stuck for a couple of weeks, which notwithstanding the frozen fishing pond and a nice run across a white, unspoilt Cross Fell, was actually a lot less exciting than you’d think. Sam and I went out onto the fishing pond to do a Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on the ice, and then a couple of months later they put up a big metal barrier to prevent dogwalkers and Michel Gondry fans from bespoiling their peace.

  In truth morale was pretty low in the Charles & Sam household.

  Spring

  The reward for our longsuffering came in the form of my sister and her husband flying out here for a week’s crash-course in Northern England. Shortly before their arrival, a spell of unnaturally nice spring weather moved in, melting the snow and cutting through the ice on the locked-up fishing pond and driving away the damp with a clean dry wind.

  

  Erika and Austin’s visit was a dream. The weather held out and we spent hours outside in the sun touring around the country. We climbed Helvellyn on a clear day and ate Twix overlooking Red Tarn and counted lucky stars. We got a Greggs and stood around in front of the Greggs passing the lukewarm pasties between us. I remember the absurdity fondly, but I have mentally blocked the experience of the pasties themselves.

  

  

  

  With the travellers safely aboard a plane back to warmer climes, Sam and I set out on a sprint through April: replacing a couple of sensors on the Fabia, helping to open a new bothy up in Kielder, a software development certification, a christening. I tried to cram in some last-minute training ahead of the Boston Marathon (not that one) down in Lincolnshire. A personal best by 20 minutes or so — but still short of my 4-hour goal. But we did stay in a lovely pub and visited a Wendy’s in the historic cathedral town of Lincoln on the way back. On balance a good trip.

  At the end of April, we trod back up to the summit of Great Knoutberry to marshal for the 61st Fellsman. A couple of runners recognised me from the previous year.

  Summer

  The first weekend in May I was out in the Lake District for a recce on leg 4 of the Bob Graham ahead of a friend’s Round in June. The day started overcast, but around noon the clouds rolled away and the sun burst in and then settled in for like 3 months straight. I hadn’t spent much time running in the Lake District — far away, crammed with 4-ton BMW SUVs, lots of climbing — but this weekend out started to reveal to me what stringy middle aged fell runners have known all along.

  

  

  

  For my birthday the government very generously gifted me British Citizenship, at a ceremony in Durham. Okay so it wasn’t a gift so much as an elaborate and financially taxing series of self-abasements before a succession of conservative governments. The point is that I earned the right to be here. So endeth a long & arduous trek from Guy Who Doesn’t Know What Maftin Means to Guy Who Makes Jokes About Frank Spencer. After the ceremony we all went into the adjoining cafe for a cream tea. Some things about this country are not at all what Americans would think, but some things absolutely are.

  A couple weeks later I made the frankly questionable decision to go out and see Richard Dawson at the Sage on a Saturday night ahead of the 6am start to the Keswick Mountain Festival 50k on the other side of the country. Dawson put on a brilliant show, and what’s better is that I actually got to relive the show over and over in a nightmarish fugue state as I hobbled the length of Buttermere and Crummock Water under a blistering sun. I finished in a perhaps less-than-spectacular time but I didn’t blow up or injure myself and finished strong. Proud of myself / never doing that again.

  A couple more shows midsummer: Boys From the Blackstuff in Newcastle; the Slam of the North poetry slam in Durham.

  Then back out onto the fells to support my friend David’s second attempt at the Bob Graham. I’d originally planned to run only a single leg but decided to continue on with him for the final leg when I realised that there was a chance of witnessing something superhuman. David didn’t disappoint. On the long smelly drive home, I wondered dimly to myself whether I could do that sort of thing one day.

  

  

  Instead, I ran the Swaledale Marathon, a gorgeous 23-mile route through the Yorkshire Dales. Well-pleased with myself here: I timed it well and finished strong. Go figure, a summer of trekking up and down the Lake District fells actually hammered some fitness into this scrawny ol frame of mine.

  As June wound down, Sam & I cashed in our PTO for the long-planned Cally2Ammy (that’s Calais → Amsterdam) cycling trip along the south coast of the North Sea. I wrote lots about it at the time but suffice it to say that Belgium is a wonderful country.

  

  

  We were back home only briefly before a trip down to London for a bit of sightseeing. Blagged our way into the House of Commons, scoped out the Globe (not the original) and the Tower of London (the original). Saw Nye with Michael Sheen, which was (and remains) my Highlight of the Year in terms of shows, and also saw The Fifth Step with Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman, which it’s fun to see famous people but the show itself was… only ok.

  

  

  

  Rounded out the summer of running with half of a “23 Before Tea” round — including a daring ascent of Jack’s Rake. Another classic Lakeland experience to check off the list.

  

  During the weekdays Sam and I got into the habit of going for a pint at the Swan & Three Cygnets in Durham, sitting in the beer garden while Ghyll climbed all over the tables; or otherwise we wandered down to the field at the Welfare Park to throw the ball around and tucker out the manic little feller. The routine of it made me feel like I’m in the right place.

  

  Autumn

  Soon the days begin to shorten and a nip in the air crept in with the sunsets. Sam and I headed out for a couple of walk/runs along the Teesdale Way, which Sam and Ghyll are walking together (and I am sort of… sherpa-ing?). Sam also schlepped up to Northumberland to walk a couple days of St. Oswald’s Way. Ghyll tuckered out after a day and a half.

  

  Throughout the autumn I sort of cut back on running — whether I’d burnt myself out over the summer or found that I just had nothing to look forward to, I started struggling to get myself out of bed during the week. I did schedule in a couple more adventures before the winter set in: back in the Lake District I supported David’s Joss Naylor (leg 2), and ran The Way of Love with a friend from Striders and his brother, and then very late in the season I undertook a foolhardy go at leg 2 + 3 of the Bob Graham Round, which got filed along with the Keswick Mountain Festival under POM/NDTA.

  Sam and I moved from the Swan & Three Cygnets to the Holy Grale for our evening pint; it has a wonderful local atmosphere and a set of board games that we dug into after one too many high-proof bombshells. When we weren’t down the pub, I picked the guitar back up for a bit of noodling; I’m not practicing for anything but I find that playing music helps me disconnect from the stress of the present.

  

  And the present was stressful! A longrunning project at work came to a head, and I found myself still at the computer cracking away at code later and later in the day, more and more often. My hands started shaking at random points and I couldn’t stop them; I started having gratuitous stress dreams.

  A visit from my mom and brother offered me a week and a half’s respite; the time with family was sorely needed. We spent some time down in London doing touristy things and then got on the train to zip back up north and take the dog out for a walk in the last of the changing leaves. And we drank a lot of beer, which is maybe not great for my physiology but was very nice in the moment.

  

  

  A last show before the winter: Brand New in Leeds. I’d always liked The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me but I’d never been into the band itself — until the show. Jesse Lacey said upfront that he wasn’t going to schmooze and that he planned to cram as many songs in as he could, and he did. Terrific show,

  Winter, again

  Back at work to heave that longrunning project over the line. GitHub Copilot was made available to us, so I downloaded it with the intention of going full Simon Willison, but then struggled to provide the right context to get it to do what I want. In fact I couldn’t get it to do much more than writing docstrings, in terms of useful shifting of complexity. Consider that my year’s commentary on the usefulness of large language models in production software.

  Long nights, bugs discovered too late, poorly-thought-out reactions to those bugs. The project was delivered in the end but it limped through the first couple of weeks ahead of Christmas. Then stress finally caught up with me and I picked up some flu on the train. It climbed into my chest and into my sinuses and down my throat and just stuck there for weeks. (Some say it’s stuck there still!) It’s very difficult to resolve bugs and communicate with stakeholders when your whole immune system is in rebellion.

  

  Even before the sickness, the desire to get up and go for a run pretty much evaporated after The Way of Love back in October. I squeezed out maybe a run or two a week and one-by-one turned off all of my progress metrics on my watch and my phone. It’s a chore and I just don’t have the energy.

  A bright note, however: the NHS listed, I applied for, and successfully interviewed for, the role which I think have been performing for the better part of a year now. The paperwork, uh, well the paperwork is still making its way through the system. More to come.

  Some vanity lists

  A year in review is not complete without a list of some kind, right?

  The year in music has been comparatively tame. Last.fm says that my most listened-to album is the soundtrack to the movie The Revenant, which ok it’s a very ambient album and I needed some calming music this year.

  A couple of proper standouts, though:

  • “End of the Middle” by Richard Dawson - Melodic, a little experimental, dealing deeply with family and regret and belonging, except for the song about Boxing Day and capitalism in the middle, which feels a bit out of place.
  • “2” by Foxwarren - Discovered when Joe Cappa did a music video for them. I love Andy Shauf’s voice, and I love the blend of oldtimey film samples and wistful strings.
  • “Equus Asinus” and “Equus Caballus” by Men I Trust - Dang I just love this sad Quebecois girl music. Doesn’t reach the highs of “Oncle Jazz” but I like the Panic! At the Disco duality of one more acoustic album and one more electronic one.

  The year in books is similarly underwhelming; I didn’t read a ton, and what I did read was not particularly exciting. I reread The Book of Dust trilogy ahead of the release of the final book, which was a little disappointing; I read the first two A Song of Ice and Fire books, which I enjoyed but which I don’t want to invest in because they’ll never be finished; The Yearling was absolutely lovely but not enough to sink teeth into; Postwar was weighty but not exactly exciting. And then a handful of other fiction & nonfiction that didn’t leave much of a mark. Maybe I will read a really good book in 2026?

  Twenty twenty-six

  2024 sucked; 2025 was pretty good. At least the middle of 2025 was really good. I spent a ton of time outside, Ghyll is finally chilling out, Sam and I spent time doing things instead of just sitting at home on the computer. On the other hand I pretty much lost the last quarter of the year to work and stress, and I need to make a serious effort not to let that happen again in 2026.

  I’m purposely trying to keep resolution-lite, but Sam and I have some plans that we need to stick to:

  • Cut out a bunch of accumulated cruft from the last four or five years: clothes we never wear, stuff we never use, projects we never finished.
  • Discover the country: I’m British now, I need to know what’s out there! We’re going to climb all of the highest points in the historic counties of England.
  • No YouTube: I simply cannot resist the YouTube algorithm, especially when I’m stressed out and have no willpower. I am quitting YouTube.com cold turkey; if I want to watch a video I am going to have to jump through some hoops.

  I, uh, may have also signed back up for the 2026 Fellsman.

  

  Year in Review Running Travel Ghyll

• ---

  Wednesday, 19 Mar 2025 10:00 pm

  E & A in the UK: Wednesday

  Big day.

  Wake up to clear, bright sun in a watery sky and frost on the ground. Gather outside for a run. The air is brisk and shadows are cold, but it’s one of those days in early spring where the sun feels supercharged and the light on my skin makes me feel like I can fly. We take the scenic route through town, up over the old pit heap and past the allotments along the back way to Trimdon. On the way back along the lines the sun glitters through the bare trees. It’s already starting to warm up.

  Shower and then head up into Newcastle; Erika and Austin have an appointment to get matching bee tattoos at a semantically-adjacent spot called Bluebottle in Whitley Bay. While they’re getting 😎 inked up 😎 Sam and I take Ghyll for a stroll down on the beach.

  

  

  The sun has well & truly brought its A-game and the sands are buzzing with spaniels and labs chasing balls hither and yon. Ghyll intercepts an errant tennis ball and plays keepaway with a Saluki and we have a hard time returning the ball without Ghyll chasing it down again. We finally part them and climb a long-disused staircase back up to the promenade.

  At the top, a man in a tracksuit sits on a step with his head in his hands, chain-vaping from what appears to be a small robot and guzzling from a can of Carling. It’s 10:15 am.

  When we return to the tattoo parlour we find that the artist has successfully sold Erika and Austin on the Gospel of Greggs, so we dutifully trek down amongst the pigeons and OAPs and their trolleys and purchase: a) a steak bake, b) a cheese and onion bake, c) a corned beef pasty, and d) a sausage roll. Then we take turns passing them clockwise through the rotation until everyone agrees that Greggs is Actually Not Very Good.

  (I might be editorialising here a little bit.)

  Once the tattoos are finished and wrapped in hydrocolloid bandages, we head back south. We’d originally planned to visit Beamish but we can’t find our passes and anyway Beamish closes relatively early midweek, so we drive down to the North York Moors instead for a walk along the cliffs above Skinningrove. It’s a steep climb but the gorse is in bloom and the track is dry and before we know it the high tide is washing the cliff foot far below us.

  

  

  There’s an old WWII-era pillbox half-buried in a field alongside the track, so we have a look — but find it totally flooded. Instead we walk out up Hummersea Point and try to find our way down to the beach. Here too we’re thwarted: the walkway has been destroyed by a storm or a landslide or a floor or something, so no access to the beach. It’s high tide anyway. We walk back along the clifftops to the car.

  The sun’s making its lazy way over the horizon so we all trundle up over the moor to Egton for dinner at the Wheatsheaf, whence good room-temperature British ale, steak pies, and sticky toffee pudding. We finish up with a pint or two at the Witching Post next door and then fall into a bit of a stupor on the drive home in the dark.

  

  

  (Not me though, cuz I was driving.)

  Family

• ---

  Tuesday, 18 Mar 2025 10:00 pm

  E & A in the UK: Tuesday

  Traffic isn’t too bad on the way down to Manchester. We get caught up a bit in rush hour traffic around Leeds, and then again on the M60 around Manchester, but before we know it we’re pulling into the airport and frantically gesturing at signs pointing us to the short-stay parking lot. It’s weirdly empty.

  We go into Terminal 2 and sit in front of the big arrivals exit. The only people in the terminal are bleary-eyed workers in high-vis. The board has only a single arrival for hours, an A330 from Orlando with my sister and my brother-in-law on it.

  We both get a sandwich.

  

  Erika and Austin emerge and we greet them with hugs and delight, and then head back to the car. There’s an abortive attempt to fit the suitcases in the boot with Ghyll, but they sort of fall on top of him as soon as we start moving, trapping him between the back of the bench seat and the jumper cables. He whines. We leave the multistory and pay £12 for the pleasure of a 40 minutes’ stay. I now understand why the car park is so empty.

  -

  Manchester is sunny and bright and a little windy. Judging by the smell on the breeze, the entire population of the city is high. I guess 11am on a Tuesday is a good time for that kind of thing. We get a coffee and a donut at Tim Hortons and stand around in the shadow of some tall building while a group of kids count passersby for a school project. An old lady shuffles past and makes smalltalk with Sam about Ghyll.

  We move on to Afflecks. We’ve been before, Sam and I, and have hearty memories of papier-mâché art in the hallways and hole-in-the-wall cassette tape shops. We take turns trying on those tiny glasses that Venjent wears. We scroll through a shop selling irreverent t-shirts, reading things like “The worst day of fishing beats the best day of withdrawing from heroin in jail” or “I AM FISH MAN” or with pictures of David Mitchell as Mark Corrigan from Peep Show.

  It feels like all of these t-shirts are just memes in real life. I look for a “i herd u liek mudkipz” one but come up empty.

  

  

  Ghyll makes a friend on the second floor, a shopkeeper from one of the adjacent stalls with a little spaniel that keeps rolling over on its back in an extremely cute way. The owner is effusive about Ghyll, who has sort of looked a bit bemused the whole time, only occasionally poking his head under a stool or a low table looking for snacks someone might have inadvertently dropped years ago.

  

  After Affleck’s we head to Bab for lunch. It’s ostensibly a kebab place but has that kind of 2010s urban millennial vibe. Red Stripe and Neck Oil on tap kind of place. The food is very good; the man brings Ghyll a couple of treats and then Ghyll spends the rest of lunch sort of standing around in the background looking forlorn and hungry for grilled lamb.

  The drive home is uneventful, but by the time we're on the A19 I've started to point out local landmarks, sharing touchstones with visitors in a way that I've (secretly) rehearsed dozens of times. First Leake Church, then the industrial vistas of Teesside, the first sign for Wingate. “This is Station Town; this is the traffic-calming measure; this is the butcher’s; this is my GP practice; this is our estate; that house at the top of the hill with the solar panels is us.”

  Erika and Austin make wonderful houseguests: they make themselves right at home, come loaded with a plastic bag full of tiny bottles of Bombay Sapphire, and immediately ask to head back out to pick up a case of beer. Now That’s What I Call Priorities.

  We grab a couple cases of Budweiser and then pop to the chip shop for a couple of cod’n’chips. They’re sort of lukewarm by the time we get home but it doesn’t take long for them to disappear.

  

  Then, exhausted, we turn in for bed.

  Family

• ---

  Tuesday, 31 Dec 2024 12:15 pm

  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

  Year in Review

aaaand the Rest of It

Posts Stream Books Walks • Clear filters