After a busy and interesting week, I hit the pause button this weekend. My Mum & Dad had sent me a book about three men driving across England in a 1958 milk float so I deliberately put aside some time to really get started on their journey.
It was also another of the 50th birthday parties, this time Steve’s, so we spent a lovely evening catching up with old friends. Bizarrely, some guests, Rick & Sam, recognised us from Nick(aka the Bok)’s fancy dress party several years ago (well, we were dressed fairly conspicuously as monks) and it transpired that they are also good friends with Daren. Separately, Maria’s parents know my Mum… I forget how small the world is, or maybe how well connected my Mum is!
It being the 1st March, the Kojo was evicted from it’s hibernation in the teahouse and I’ve already seen a bee making good use of its blossom. I was tempted to do more gardening but the ground is still too sodden to make it an appealing prospect. Instead I turned my attention to the cars… unwashed since last year.
Despite living outside, Kim’s car was not too dirty on account that I sluice the water off the top half of it each morning. This is ostensibly to make it easy for her to see out of the windows, but it also means that it looks fairly clean despite not having been washed. The inside was a different matter though, as the cherry tree came back in it the other weekend.
My car was caked, inside and out, the final icing (right colour, right texture) being the mud from my run with Daren last week. I actually really like cleaning cars and I worked happily outside for more than two hours washing and hoovering… and then went back out there again today to put a coat of polish on my car while it’s still clean.
My run today was back inside on the machine again and really only counts as ‘keeping my hand in until the weather warms up a little more’. I started at 7 mph and raised the speed by 0.5 mph each quarter mile for the first mile and then just repeated this for a further three miles. In the last quarter mile I ramped the speed up a little more and completed 4 miles in 31.01, an average of 7.73 mph.
This week I started some little experiments to figure out how I could utilise a new social media platform called Niume. It’s a young London-based start-up (which I like) and the idea is not so much to connect people as to connect ideas in the form of conversations (which I also like).
My FosterRuns experiment on niume is a relaxed conversational circle for occasional runners and my hope is that some of my readers here will feel more inclined to engage in dialogue in that environment. There are also many more interesting conversations going on there, so it’s worth taking a peek.