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Covid Cometh

Friday, February 12th, 2021

2020 started much as 2019 had ended: with lots of activity. In the first week alone I’d done the running club’s New Year hash, the Hampshire XC Champs, and a CC6 at Badger Farm, with another one at Janesmoor two weeks later. In addition to running, there was plenty of orienteering to be had, with events at Fritham, Star Posts, Denny Wood, Mark Ash Wood, and Black Water in the first couple of months. There was also SOC and South-Central Junior Squad training to attend.

Orienteering wasn’t restricted to the forest though. I went to a Wessex Night League event around Marchwood, and the club’s monthly MapRun events were still a regular feature. We put on January’s event in Eastleigh on what was a particularly damp evening. February brought a fiendish course around Badger Farm and Oliver’s Battery in Winchester with the added bonus that, with the children away for half term, both Christine and I could stay to the pub afterwards. Sadly their absence also meant an opportunity for me to redecorate the bathroom including my first, and hopefully last, attempt at plastering a ceiling!

There was a railway theme to this period, starting with a trip to the Signal Box in Romsey. We’ve probably passed the entrance road hundreds of times but never been in. It was actually quite fun and we whiled away an hour or more there. A week later, we went to the Southampton Model Railway Exhibition at Barton Peveril College. There were lots of grey-haired men in evidence but both the children enjoyed themselves. It then wasn’t long before Duncan had purchased himself some track on eBay to supplement the small loop he’d got for Christmas and we were fitting them to a large board, suitably sized to slide away under his bed.

March brought a couple of INSET days for Duncan. Christine took him to the BlueReef aquarium on one, I took him for a bike ride in the New Forest on the other. At least, it was a bike ride for Duncan. My rear derailleur snapped part way round and I ended up jogging along pushing my bike for about 5k until we got back to Lyndhurst where the bike shop shortened my chain. Having filled up on cake in one of Lyndhurst’s many tea shops, we then set off back to Ashurst to catch the train home. Certainly an adventure!

That weekend, we headed to Monmouth and this was the first indication in my diary of what was to come: “have to be on our best behaviour hygiene wise”. Covid-19 had hit the news and Christine’s Mum, who has an immunosuppressive disease, was potentially particularly vulnerable. We had a lovely, if blustery, walk up Sugar Loaf on Saturday and went to the CompassSport Cup event near Gloucester on our way home, where SOC qualified for the final.

The following day, the government announced that non-essential travel should be avoided at which point the JK and British Champs were cancelled. Two days later, it was announced that schools would close at the end of the week. Priority for online shopping being given to the elderly and vulnerable, I joined the long queues at the supermarket one morning to be greeted with shelves empty of staples (the stockpiling of toilet paper was to become a national joke). At the end of that week, we went to the library to discover it had closed the day before. That weekend, we went for a walk and a cycle ride – what were to become staples for the months to follow.

Home schooling started the next week. Emma was well-catered for with her secondary school continuing a regular timetable over Microsoft Teams. Duncan, meanwhile, was sent a few suggestions of things to do and left to get on with it. Another tradition of lockdown was born: a morning lesson over FaceTime with Granny Sue.

Perhaps the hardest part for us was the mandate that people could only go out once a day for exercise which often meant a choice between a walk with the children or a run. Running with the children zooming along on scooters was one solution. Cycling together with the children also became much more appealing as the roads were largely empty of cars. At least the weather was smiling on us and we were certainly grateful to have a garden in which to enjoy break times.

And we’re back!

Wednesday, February 10th, 2021

From time-to-time, I feel the urge to write a blog post on something and then I realise that there’s this gaping void since I last wrote anything (16 months) for which it would be remiss not to say anything given all that has happened. So, the next few posts will be a whistle-stop tour of that gap, hopefully, followed by some more regular posting. The advantage of going back over a year is that I get to relive life pre the big ‘C’ (that’s Covid, not Cancer, for those looking back at some point in the future when hopefully this is all but a distant memory).

So what happened between Duncan’s birthday and the end of 2019? There was lots of outdoor activity, starting with Christine running the Clarendon Marathon. I did a couple of the CC6 cross-country events, as well as two Hants XC League races. The one at Sparsholt college was a particularly good mudbath! I was also continuing to run the monthly Strava challenges set by my ex-colleagues at IBM and returning to Hursley every other Wednesday to either run or marshall the fit52 5k events.

On the orienteering front, I planned an event at Fritham which was well attended despite the atrocious weather. After hanging controls, the rest of the family disappeared to get the car MOT’d as we’d discovered the night before that it had expired! I managed to leave one of the controls out in the forest but thankfully was back there a couple of days later for a Tuesday evening run and could retrieve it.

During half-term, we all went along to a Military League South event at Roundhill. It was the November Classic at the end of that week and I had the fun job of parking cars in an area that we were sharing with Totton RC’s Stinger race. It seemed to work okay although I then had a terrible run on Bramshaw. Emma was meant to attend an O-Camp at Burley Youth Hostel that weekend but it ended up being only a single night due to more bad weather.

We also managed another club event at Kings Garn Gutter and the British Schools Orienteering Champs near Slough where both children had good runs. SOC was also having monthly MapRun events taking us to Winchester, Romsey, and Southampton.

Music was another theme with Christine performing in two Thornden Community Wind Band concerts, Duncan taking his Grade 3 recorder exam, and Emma appeared in a school concert singing and playing the violin and recorder (not all at once). Not sure what my contribution to this them was!

On the work front, I had two overseas trips. An internal meeting in Raleigh (again) and then I was on booth duty at our DevOps World event in Lisbon (a first visit to Portugal for me). I was interviewed for, and offered, a job which would have seen me return to an office location. After much soul searching and discussion with my current management, I decided to turn the offer down but it did precipitate my move into a tech lead role at CloudBees.

Indirectly related to work, I gave one of Christine’s lectures on “Databases and SQL”, a subject that has been occupying a disproportionate amount of my time. I also helped out at a Code Retreat back at IBM which was good fun. I made a last-minute decision to go to the London Java Community’s Unconference. I almost didn’t make it when my key got stuck in my bike lock at the station but, with some WD40 courtesy of SW Trains, I was on my way again. There were some good sessions as well as providing an opportunity to catch up with some old friends.

Despite many an hour spent completing Advent of Code (in Python this year), there was still time for some socialising in the run-up to Christmas starting with the CloudBees Whitely Christmas meal. The “Run the Pubs” tradition continued, albeit with less running and fewer pubs! It was also our turn to host a group of friends for pre-Christmas drinks. We’d just about recovered from that before disappearing to Monmouth for Christmas itself. We then made a trip across to my parents before New Year which was to prove to be the last time we’d see them face-to-face for over a year…

Double-Digit Duncan

Saturday, October 5th, 2019

This year marks the end of an era as we now no longer have any children with ages in single digits! Duncan’s birthday was on a school day so was a fairly quiet affair (although this year we did, at least, remember that he was entitled to wear non-uniform). He’ll also have to wait several weeks for his party due to the lack of anything suitable on at the cinema (or at least that’s the excuse we’re using).

Update time

Thursday, September 5th, 2019

WordPress has been nagging me for some time that I needed to update the version of PHP this blog is running on and, in particular, Jetpack had finally given up on me. The sticking point has been that the Digital Ocean droplet it’s running on has been stuck back on Trusty Tahr and a previous attempt to upgrade it had gone awry.

I finally took the plunge and set up a new droplet running Bionic Beaver and eventually found the right combination of PHP modules to get everything running again. Whilst I was at it, I ticked another item off my todo list and enabled TLS (trivial with the aid of Certbot and Let’s Encrypt). A late evening but nothing too painful.

On the downside, when I first set the blog up (back in 2005) I used Gallery to manage images. The WordPress plugin died a while back but the Gallery install itself failed to play nicely with the new PHP version. As a consequence, the item to write a script to locate all those <wpg2id> tags and replace them with the appropriate images still remains very much on my todo list. Oh, and then there’s all those GPX files that were being displayed with Google Maps…

Druidic Rave

Thursday, September 5th, 2019

The children weren’t back at school until Thursday and, as we still have time left on our English Heritage membership, we decided to head to Stonehenge for a visit. I admit that this was largely for my benefit. The children have both been there on school trips. I, on the other hand, just have childhood memories of looking at the stones through the 6ft fence from the road when we stopped at the car park for lunch on our way to holiday in Bournemouth!

Although the road has now been diverted, you can still stand at that same point without paying a penny. The fence has been reduced to 3 feet high but there’s a burly security guard to ensure that no-one takes advantage of this! As a paying guest, you get closer to the stones although you’ll have to come on the solstice or one of the small group tours to actually get amongst them.

The car park has now relocated to ~1 mile away and is adjacent to the shiny new exhibition centre. We decided to walk from there to the stones rather than take the shuttle bus. Unfortunately, more than three-quarters of the exhibition centre is given over to the shop, cafe and toilets, which means what remains feels rather cramped. As with the audio tour, the exhibition struggles with the fact that no-one really knows why Stonehenge is there and probably never will. As impressive as it is, I left thinking “but look what the Egyptians were doing at the same time”!

Oh, and what of the “Druidic Rave”? An anagram of my name!

Camping Capers

Wednesday, September 4th, 2019

On the Bank Holiday Monday we continued on to Gower where we were booked in to camp at Pitton Cross. Admittedly it was not our first choice but, at least in the camping field away from the electric hookups, it was a pleasant enough site. On arrival, we wasted no time in checking out the footpaths that led down to the nearest rocky cove, less than a mile away.

The next morning, we made the slightly longer trek to Mewslade Bay. It was pretty quiet when we arrived but filled up as the day went on. As is my want, I didn’t make it in over my knees but the water must have been fairly warm as the others spurned their wetsuits when bodyboarding. As high tide approached, the sand almost disappears completely and we were almost the last ones off the beach. The day was rounded off with a lovely meal with friends over in Oxwhich.

Wednesday was forecast to be wet and it didn’t disappoint. I did quite a lot of reading whilst Christine and the children dodged the showers with a walk to Rhossili. The sun re-emerged in the evening when we went over to Port Eynon, picking up fish and chips on our way back to the tent. We then copied our neighbours as they tried out their frisbee and then kite.

The sun was out again on Thursday although the blustery wind made us think twice about our planned trip over the causeway to Worm’s Head. It was fine though and the lush green grass on the island contrasted beautifully against the blue skies and water. As I set off for a run over Rhossili Down, Emma was heading down to the beach for more bodyboarding. Duncan was less keen. Perhaps not surprising when we later discovered that we’ve mistakenly given his younger cousin the wetsuit he wore earlier in the summer and were trying to shoehorn him into the smaller version. He also caught a glancing blow from a bodyboard flapping about in the wind which didn’t improve matters! Nothing that couldn’t be resolved with tea and cake though.

With the wind set to continue through the night, for the second time this summer we decided to pack up our tent that evening and head home. For myself and the children, it wasn’t an end to our camping though. We joined friends for our annual ‘Dad’s camping’ night on Saturday. This year we spurned the New Forest and stayed at Holden Farm on the South Downs. The site facilities were flawless although the grass was a little long where we were in the overflow field.

We made the short walk to the Flower Pots Inn in Cheriton, only to find it closed for the afternoon. As the heavens opened, they took pity on us and supplied beer as we (and others) sheltered in the marquee. When the sun came back, we returned to the campsite for the traditional BBQ. The Dads didn’t manage to stay up much longer than the kids as, having failed to book a firepit, the temperature plummetted as darkness fell. It was also only in the dark that you became acutely aware of how loud the traffic on the A272 was. It’s still a lovely location though and I’m sure we shall be back.

More photos from Gower over on Flickr.

Sunny Severn Half

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2019

In marked contrast to last year’s event, this August Bank Holiday the Severn Bridge Half Marathon was blessed with blue rather than grey skies (perhaps because they removed the sun from the medal?!). I was, once again, rather unsure of how I would fare as I stood on the start line. This time it was the discussion I’d had with a physio three days earlier about starting a run-walk programme to relieve my right knee pain that was praying on my mind.

As it transpired, I need not have worried. Whether it was something the physio had done, the adrenaline from the race, or the large ibuprofen I’d taken that morning, my knee hardly bothered me at all during the race. If anything, the exercises that I’ve been doing over the past couple of months meant my legs felt stronger than usual. As we came back over the bridge, I was able to haul in a few runners and finished 12th in 1:23:52, knocking a full minute off my time from last year. Apparently I’m due a prize as 2nd MV40 although it has to be said that the first placed vet was over seven minutes ahead of me!

Given the sunshine, rather than racing off back to the car as last year, I had fun with the children handing out bananas to finishers and, towards the end, anyone who would take a bag or two off our hands!

Peak District Camping

Sunday, August 11th, 2019

We had our first trip away of the school holidays last week. We were due to camp in Edale in the Peak District and, with the news full of the reservoir full to bursting-point at nearby Whaley Bridge, we were somewhat concerned about the potential weather conditions. As we arrived at Upper Booth Farm there was, thankfully, no sign of the forecast downpours.

The campsite itself is fairly remote (the final instruction from the sat-nav was to turn right onto the Pennine Way!) but it was a pleasant walk over the fields to the pub in Edale for dinner where we were joined by Christine’s cousin. We started out again that way the next morning to pick up lunch supplies and then continued on up Grindsbrook and on to Kinder Downfall, returning via Jacob’s Ladder.

On Tuesday, we drove to the National Trust car park at Mam Tor and had a quick trip up to the top before walking down into Castleton. We visited the town’s main attraction (one of the many tea shops) and then, as we have English Heritage membership at the moment, Peveril Castle. Not much to see of the castle but, having ascended to the keep, there are good views to be had. We returned to the car via Cave Dale and headed for Blue John Cavern just as the heavens opened. The natural caverns are fairly impressive and the guide was both informative and entertaining.

Christine abandoned us to visit her aunt in hospital the next day. We drove round to Ashopton (most of which is now under Ladybower Reservoir) and walked up and along Derwent Edge. Christine had picked her day as this was the only occasion on which we had to don full waterproofs whilst out walking. Christine returned with her cousin (a different one) and two children and we checked out the other pub in Edale that evening.

The enlarged party went for a walk along Stanage Edge the next day. The rocks were crawling with climbers. We then decamped to Hathersage’s open air pool. The pool is heated but it was absolutely heaving which meant moving about sufficiently to actually stay warm was difficult. I was happy to warm up with a pot of tea afterwards whereas Emma went for the obligatory holiday ice cream.

With rain forecast for the Friday, we decided to pack up a dry tent and head home late Thursday evening.

More photos over on Flickr.