Eight Days In

I’m now eight days into my fifties… so far, so good!

My new decade started with a lovely family lunch gathering where we toasted with a particularly delicious bottle of Dom Perignon that had been patiently waiting for such an occasion since before my forties.

Then a quiet dinner for Kim and I turned out to be a surprise gathering of close friends (mainly old school friends) at the Coach House in Brighton.  I’m being deliberate in saying ‘old’ on account of being the youngest person in my year.  It was a totally brilliant surprise… thank you guys… especially as I had seen many of them at Pete’s party two days earlier!

A few days later I was helping my wonderful folks to reduce clutter and came across a resting butterfly and then, later the same day, a Sparrowhawk (according to my learned friend Lucas) in my garden.

I woke up at 5am on Saturday in order to drive to the Porsche Experience Centre at Silverstone, where I spent the morning essentially going around in circles of various speeds and sizes, with Eunan MacGuinness gently correcting my foibles.  BIG GRIN!  I then spent the afternoon driving around a series of beautiful local villages with a friend in a Boxster.

Sunday then became a day of rest (I was royally knackered) but this morning started early with the rumble of a V8 and a run with the Bok himself, Mister Broom.

We ran my most recent normal route, but there the similarity ended.  For starters we had audible conversation, where the voices are normally only in my head.  More noticeable was the speed of progress, which was closer to the speed I was going around the ex-Lombard Rally special-stage-track at Silverstone than to any kind of running that I’ve done recently.  It must have approached Bokwarp on occasion by all accounts, which sort of explains the photos…

5.75 miles was duly dispatched in about 50 minutes… an average of 6.9 mph.

Eight days in… may the rest of my fifties continue in a similar vein!