And the band played on...

...in which I discover the joys of the M25

Well it's not quite true to say I "discovered" it; I have travelled on it before, but it's been a while.  My new contract is in Kent, and initially I need to be down here to gather user requirements and so on, which means driving down on a Sunday evening and leaving early on a Friday (trains are not an option this time, as they're simply too expensive and inconvenient, so I'm hiring a car each week).

In its time the M25 has been called a lot of things.  A 117-mile long car park. A rather pointless waste of public money.  The occult symbol Odegra (see Good Omens).  I prefer a more literal description - it's a horribly long and dull stretch of road on which a large minority of people apparently feel that it's perfectly OK to drive like sub-literate barbarians to whom the words "Highway Code" are a mere collection of syllables; and it is also now the bane of my life, especially on a Friday when it acts as a way of stopping me getting home at a reasonable time.

Anyway, I'm staying with friends down here at the moment, which is nice as it means I have someone to talk to in the evenings and they're looking after me really well.  It's been a bit of adjustment as it's such a long way to come but hopefully within a couple of months I'll be able to alternate between being at home and being down here.

So...running.  Yes.  Um.  Oh look, a flying rhinocerous!  Okay, okay, I admit it, I haven't really done any for the last couple of weeks.  We do have a treadmill at home now (and there's one in the garage here too that I can use) so the weather isn't really a problem, but I'm definitely struggling on the motivation front.  So, more effort definitely required there.  On the plus side I do still seem to be losing a little bit of weight each week which will hopefully make the running easier once I do manage to get back to it.  Which will be soon.  Honest.

Apart from that I'm learning lots of stuff about the new programming stuff from Microsoft, but since a very small percentage of people are likely to have any interest in that I shall skip lightly over it.

Lots has probably happened in the last couple of weeks that I've managed to completely forget, which I shall blame on age.  Or possibly madness.  Or both.

In any case, I shall try to make an effort to blog more - it's been a somehat frantic few weeks but hopefully things will settle down a bit now and I can get on with boring you all.

The blog is late!

In which I apologise for the late blog...

Yes, the blog will be late this week. Sorry about that. This is because I'm say in a service station on the M54 with 200 miles to drive...more tomorrow, hopefully!

A somewhat better use of twitter as a customer service tool

In which the colour blue features in a negative capacity

Don't get me wrong, I like the colour blue. Blue skies are nice. Blues music is good. My bike is blue. The shower gel I'm using at the moment (well not this very moment, obviously) is blue.  The book I'm reading has a blue cover.

On the whole though, blue is not a good colour for mashed potatoes to be.  In fact, there are very few foods I can think of that are blue, but tonight my family was subjected to blue mashed potatoes due to the conjunction of my wife being on the phone to me, the potatoes being in a saucepan on the side, teen in training and a bottle of blue food colouring.  Quite why he decided that tipping food colouring into the mashed potatoes was a good idea I'm not sure, especially as he had to eat them.  Apparently they tasted just the same anyway.

Anyway, on with the blog. Slightly late (and from my phone) this week as I had no internet yesterday, which coincidentally is what this bit of the post is about. I asked on twitter to see if anyone else on my ISP was having problems; I got no response, but then today I got an @ message from Demon Broadband asking if I was still having trouble.

Since they don't follow me, they had clearly searched for anyone mentioning Demon and took the trouble to arrange for someone to call to see if it could be fixed. As it turned out it was probably a BT issue, so they couldn't have done much, but I was impressed with the proactive attitude to trying to sort it out.

I was somewhat less impressed when I tried to call the freephone number I had for their automated service announcements and got a service for reporting smokers in Glasgow city centre bus shelters. I'm sure that's very useful, but it's not exactly helpful if you're trying to find out if your ISP had a network fault.  To be fair to them this was because I had an old number on a card they sent me when I set the account up...

Anyway, running and stuff...yeah. I need a running partner I think, I was really struggling tonight (no running since last Thursday) and I only ran 4K.

I would also like to protest at the placement of eateries in the village. On my way to Tesco to buy sandwiches and fruit I have to walk past 2 indian takeaways, 2 chip shops, a pub that does food and a hotel with a restaurant. Can you say "temptation"?

That's it for this week. I shall try to post more later in the week once I'm home.
Apologies as usual for spelling errors and lack of formatting. It's my phone's fault.

An interesting day...

...in which I have what my manager terms a "genius moment".

As you will know if you've been following my exploits thus far, I am currently working away from home.  This usually involves getting up at 4:30 on a Monday morning (all together now: "aww").
This week, however, I phoned the taxi firm a bit late in the weekend so I had to make do with an earlier time slot.  Since I need a cup of coffee just to be semi-functional in the mornings I had to get up about 4:10AM.  

As usual I sat at the PC messing about on twitter and facebook for a bit while drinking my coffee and waiting for the taxi, but when I stood up to go and get my shoes on I managed to trip over the mouse cable, which had somehow coiled itself around my foot like a deadly snake poised to strike.  I went flying across the front room, but managed to prevent myself falling.

The taxi turned up and as I was doing my usual last-minute inventory I realised I didn't have my phone.  I'm sure you'll be familiar with that horrible sinking feeling you get when you realise that something you need is missing and you only have a short amount of time to find it...anyway, I remembered it had been in my shirt pocket so must have flown out in the trip wire incident.  I managed to find it under the sofa after a couple of minutes of frenzied searching.

Things went back to normal after that; I got to the station in plenty of time (30 minutes early, in fact), where I sat wishing I'd worn warmer clothes for a bit.

On the London train this week there were no charging sockets, and the train was a bit manky compared to the usual standard, but the journey continued as usual until I got off at Banbury for my first change.

The train was a little late getting in, so I only had a minute or 2 to make my connection. As I got off I heard the announcement saying the 7:55 was departing from platform 2. That's not the platform it usually goes from (it usually goes from the platform I get off at), but I assumed that the train I'd just got off was in the way so they'd sent it to a different platform.

I didn't hear the announcement when we stopped at the first station as I was in the vestibule at the end of the carriage and the speaker seemed to be broken.  However, when we got to the next station I saw the sign.
"Coventry". 

Hmm. You know the awful feeling you get when you've just done something incredibly, monumentally silly? The sort of thing you know people are going to laugh at you about for years, and eventually needs counselling to get over?

I'm sure you can see where this is going. It is rarely a good idea to get in a train that is going in the opposite direction to where you need to go, but that is what I had managed to do.

Fortunately the later version of the train that I should have got on at Banbury was at Coventry, so I managed a mad dash across the bridge and then a dive onto the "right" train with about 2 seconds to spare.  I was an hour late for work but they were all suitably amused by my stupidity.

At Reading (going in the right direction) the train stopped, as trains do at stations. A man got on, went to the loo and then got off again while the train was waiting. That seems like quite a risky strategy to me, but perhaps all the loos at the station were out of order.

My wife was very sympathetic when I told her about my day...once she stopped laughing (which took quite some time) she said "trouble comes in threes so something else had to go wrong yet".  Thanks for that, darling.  However, I hold that the tripping incident and the phone incident were separate, and that I am therefore now safe.

Anyway, running and stuff. Yesterday I went for a run with Nicky, of skinnyblog fame (see link on left, I can't do them on phone). We did 4.3 miles in about 50 minutes, including having to climb through a hedge to avoid an overflowing ford.  That's really pretty good, especially as that's the first time I've done that distance, but I do need to up the speed some to beat the 2 hour mark for the half marathon.

Right, apologies for all the spelling mistakes I've no doubt made and the lack of nice formatting. Phones are not an ideal medium on which to type blog posts, but needs must when you're faced with your own stupidity...

A quiet week...sort of

In which I can't think of anything much to write.

I've had to get my brother with his enormous ladder (no, that's not a euphemism) around yesterday.  This was because Mad Middle Child had decided to throw the front door keys onto the roof.  This may require some explanation, I realise.

A little while ago he (Mad Middle Child (MMC), not my brother) bought himself a new bike with his pocket money.  As children will he's treated it quite roughly, but this week the handlebar stem snapped, which I'm pretty sure is not supposed to happen unless you drop it off a building or something. 

The people in the shop were very apologetic about this and replaced it, despite the fact that he'd taken the "peggies" off and it was generally a bit wrecked.  They also said he should wear a helmet in case there was an issue with that specific model and the new bike does the same thing - it could have been quite dangerous, after all, and they gave us a free helmet for him.


To say that MMC was a bit upset at us telling him he couldn't go out on his bike without a helmet on is like saying that the sun is a bit hot.  Incandescent would be about the most gentle word you could use for it.  So he decided to grab the keys to the garage, and when I went to stop him getting the new bike out he threw them on the roof.  At least it's better than the times he decides to throw shoes at us.


He's still refusing to wear his helmet and we're still refusing to let him  out on his bike without it.  It's a war of attrition that will be won by the side with the greatest willpower. 



If you don't have children yourself and are planning to tell me how to deal with this in the comments, feel free; but I suggest you get some children first - it will be the last time in your life you have all the answers.


Right, where was I?  Oh yes, training and dieting and stuff.  I've been skipping the fried breakfasts this week and eating quite disgustingly healthily at lunchtime and dinnertime, at least most of the time, and I've been for 2 5.5k-ish runs with the guys from work, which is more than I've run in any week since starting training.  So I was a bit disappointed to find that I've only lost a pound this week.  It's quite important for me to lose weight since the heavier I am the harder it is to run, but at least it's going in vaguely the right direction (just slowly).

 On the plus side, I'm not feeling so tired after runs and am generally managing OK.  My legs still ache a bit, but I don't have to virtually crawl up the guest house stairs when I get back; and on the second run this week we managed the distance in less than 40 minutes, which I felt very proud of until I realised that to make my target for the half-marathon I have to do 4 times as much distance and each 5.5k needs to take less than 30 minutes.  Oh-oh.


I have a week and a half left at my current contract before I go off to a place even further away.  In one way I'm looking forward to it since I'll actually get to use all the software development stuff I've learnt over the years, but in another way I'm approaching it with some trepidation.  I know it won't be such a relaxed environment as I'm in now, and I doubt the people I have to work with will be as nice (but we shall see).

They have sent me the source code for the application they currently use; I won't go into technnical details, but if it was a building it would be on a show with a name like "return of the worst cowboy builders from hell ever - the baddest of the bad".   This is code that was not so much written as perpetrated.

I think I'm starting to ramble a bit now, so it's probably time to sign off.  Until next time, folks...

The breakfast temptation of Chris

In which I attempt to convey the struggle that is breakfast time.

Come with me on a journey into your imagination.  Imagine, if you will, walking into a small but friendly dining room.  It's fairly early, around 7:30ish, and you've just had a shower and walked downstairs.

The smell of bacon and mushrooms frying wafts from the kitchen. Some other guests are already eating, invariably something cooked.

You've eaten here before, and you know that the breakfasts are spectacularly good; the bacon is always the way you like it, the egg is always done to perfection, the  mushrooms are wonderful. The sausage appears to be made of actual pork, not the bread-like stuffing you get in so many sausages.

Imagine your mouth watering as you savour the amazing nasal symphony floating from the kitchen.

Imagine having to say "no" when the nice lady that runs the guest house asks if you want any thing cooked for breakfast.

I settled for fruit and fibre and a zero fat yoghurt, if you were wondering. On the plus side I felt very virtuous, at least until I looked at the calorie and fat content on the pastie I had with my sandwiches and fruit at teatime. I suppose the run I went on just before probably used up most of the pastie calories.

An ordinary week

In which I get a bit of a nasty shock.  And don't moan about trains at all.

*tap tap*.  Hey, is this thing on?

Bear with me, I have been commanded to go and get the washing in.

Right, back...oh but now I need the loo.  Just hang on a minute there.

Okay, really back properly now.  Maybe I'll just have a quick go on Bejeweled Blitz while I'm composing my thoughts.

Now I really am back.  This week's been a bit ordinary really, not much to tell you about.  I can't moan about the journey, which was fine in both directions,  although the train home was just as crowded as usual - I was just lucky enough to get a seat for once.

So, the boring stuff that the blog is actually about first - I've run a couple of times this week, both fairly short runs as nobody from work was out running this week and I tend not to run very far when I'm by myself because I don't know my way around well enough so I'd just get lost, which I have done on a number of occasions.  According to MapMyRun.com the route I followed is 3.84KM, which isn't too bad I guess.  I did struggle a bit on Tuesday because I hadn't run at all over the weekend, so that's a lesson learnt - I was fine when I did it on Thursday though.


I went out for a chinese in one of the local restaurants with a friend from work on Wednesday.  We'd been to this particular restaurant before so we ordered 3 dishes each (the food is good, but a bit insubstantial).  Eating with chopsticks is something that it's going to take me a long, long time to get used to but at least it means I eat slowly (I'm usually sitting with an empty plate long before anybody else's is even half empty).


I had Tom Yum chicken, which I'm pretty sure is a made up name.  It's basically chicken and onions in what tastes like spicy tomato soup.  At least it comes with a china spoon thingy so you don't have to eat the soup with chopsticks.  I discovered during the course of the evening that I've been pronouncing the word "Szechuan" wrong for years, too.  I think we'll just skip lightly over that.

So, I'm sure you're waiting for me to stop prattling on and tell you what the bit of a shock referred to in the subtitle was.  Somebody brought in some extra-super-posh scales this week, which measure all kinds of stuff by sending electrical pulses through you then making educated guesses (I think).  We all took turns on them, and when it came to mine...well, there's no nice way to say it.  I was expecting the weight (which was bad but is getting better, slowly), but it also works out stuff like Visceral Index (how much fat you have around your organs - mine was 11 which is defnitely on the high side) and um...metabolic age.  Mine was 11 years older than it should be, which is a Very Bad Thing (the only other person whos metabolic age was as high as mine really is that age).


If it had just been me I might not have been too bothered, after all it's probably not that accurate...but everybody else went on them and they were all much much better than mine (except the manager, but at least he was a good 10 pounds lighter than me), and since they are all pretty fit it seems likely that the things are reasonably accurate.


So, something must be done.  I'm already eating healthily...well, most of the time, and running around 4k every other day, but there's one meal each day that is, at the moment, distinctly unhealthy.  So, really, there's only one thing to give.  This is not a decision I want to make, but it has to be done.  'tis better to have scoffed and lost than never to have scoffed at all, and all that...


The full English breakfasts have to go.  Bye bye, bacon.  Elveda, egg.  So long, sausage.   Bye beans.  Toodle-oo, tomato.  And finally, the greatest sacrifice of all, the thing that I will miss more than all the rest...I must say farewell, arrivederci and adieu to the mushrooms.  Oh, the mushrooms...won't somebody think of the mushrooms!


Well, there's no avoiding it.  If I'm going to run 13 miles in anything like a reasonable time (under 2 hours is my goal, at the moment) then my lifestyle has to change; that was part of the point of all this, after all.  Nobody said it would be easy.


Maybe I can get away with just one fried breakfast a week...

Haircuts and Sunsets...

In which I have a haircut.  And do some running, possibly.

After my last post I'm sure you're all wondering how I got on with my journey home this week (I promise this will be quick and then I'll stop whining about trains, at least until next week).

To experience my journey home in full 3D-smell-and-touch-o-rama (tm), here's what to do:  Take a room (not air conditioned) about 6' by 4' and try to get 11-12 people (and some luggage) in.  Now start it moving at between 60 - 70 miles per hour and bump it quite hard occasionally.  Every 15 - 20 minutes or so, stop it, take 2 people out and put 3 - 4 in.

Make sure there's a door marked "toilet" with an out of order sign on it somewhere in the room, and have people occasionally attempt to get through the press of bodies to use it.  Stand in the room yourself for 2.5 hours with nothing but your mobile phone  (or a book) for entertainment.  There you go, you have successfully created a simulation of the Basingstoke - Wolverhampton stage of my journey home (the rest of it's not too bad, thankfully).

If you want to specifically recreate this week's journey, at least one of the people should have an embarrassing personal complaint that leads to a smell of incontinent sheep and another should play music (on headphones) so loudly that everybody else in the carriage can hear it clearly.

Anyway, let's file that one under "done to death" before the blog becomes monotonous.  The stated purpose for the moment is supposed to be for me to let you know how I'm doing with training for the half-marathon that I have to run in March next year.  The trouble is "I ran and went this far in this many minutes" doesn't take long to write and it might be a bit dull to read, and I have no intention of admitting to my current weight, but anyway - I went for a run on Tuesday with some folks from work, we ran 5.5k and I didn't have to stop to walk (except to cross roads, but that doesn't count).  Huzzah!  

On Thursday I was stood up by my dinner date (he had to go and get a present for his girlfriend, and the other mitigating circumstance was that he had an operation scheduled on his knee the next day.  I suppose I can let him off this time...), so I went out for a run by myself.  I'm not sure exactly how far I ran but when I got back to the guest house I was a rather interesting red colour and there wasn't much difference between how wet I was going into the shower and how wet I was when I got out.  That's pretty much it for exercise this week, but there are definite signs of progress.

This week I also went for a haircut.  I walk past the barber shop every day, and it appears to be the only barber in the village (b'dum tish!).  It's quite a big barber for such a small village (especially as it's connected to the huge hairdressers/beauty salon thing next door) but I suppose there are a lot of contractors around most of the time.  Or maybe the ladies (and gents) in the village just like a good waxing.  

I was somewhat startled to discover that the price of a haircut in Hampshire is twice what I usually pay for it, especially as I hadn't actually looked at the prices before asking for a cut.  It's a nice haircut (according to my wife), and I shall treasure it for the 2 weeks it takes my hair to return to its usual state of Medusa-like total unmanageability.

Also on Wednesday: 

This was the view from the railway bridge.  The world is really a pretty stunning place sometimes.


Not much else happened this week; my next contract has been confirmed (yay) and it's even further away (boo), but it is real, genuine, proper software development based.  Which is a Very Good Thing, and will also hopefully eventually lead to me being able to laze abo...I mean work from home most of the time


Football season has started again so I now have very little spare time at weekends either - Mad Middle Child and Teen In Training both have training on a Saturday and matches on a Sunday, so lots of time is spent standing in muddy fields.  Still, Mad Middle Child scored a goal last week, which is apparently a good thing...


I think that's me done for this week.  Over and out... 


Addendum (I forgot!).  I managed to cut my ear while attempting to remove a fleck of shaving gel.  With a razor.  It now bleeds profusely every time I manage to knock the scab off, which is approximately once per day.  If you ever have a spec of shaving gel on your ear, I recommend not attempting to remove it with whatever sharp implement you happen to have in your hand at the time.  Important safety tip there!

How not to use twitter as a public relations tool

In which I whinge a bit in that reserved English way.

(I'm posting this from my phone so don't expect fancy formatting and please excuse any spelling mistakes).

As you may have guessed this is going to be a bit of a moan, so if your plans for the day don't include reading complaints about train companies now would be the perfect time to stop reading.

In my last post I briefly mentioned that the cross country train that I was on on Friday was somewhat overcrowded.  Actually that's a massive understatement, it was like being forced to play sardines with a bunch of strangers. I mean it was literally so bad that you couldn't get to the toilet (but that didn't matter much since the loo was out of order anyway, as usual).

So I decided to look up cross country trains on twitter. (If you're not familiar with twitter, it basically lets you write short messages a bit like facebook status updates but limited to 140 characters, and it's surprisingly addictive).

I managed to find them at @crosscountryuk, and sent the following 2 messages:

"@crosscountryuk who does the seat provisioning on your bournemouth-manchester service? 7 weeks, 1 seay, tonight 15 people between carriages"

"@crosscountryuk I've only been able to reserve a seat once and apparently you're completely unaware that this week most schools went back."

(The @crosscountryuk bit is a bit like an email address but more public - other people can see the message too, but it's specifically aimed at them).

Ok, a bit whiney I'll admit but bear in mind at this point I'd been standing up for about 1.5 hours and was apparently breathing other peoples' sweat.

This was their response:

"Hi Chris. Always best to reserve a seat as our trains are very popular. We're working to make our reservation systems more reliable"
--http://www.twitter.com/crosscountryuk/status/24272199910

Well I assume it was a response to me - there's no @ name so it could be to some other Chris, but let's make the assumption for now and examine the content, ("let's unpack that", as the fairy godmother in Shrek 2 might say) shall we?

My gripe was 1) I can't get a seat on this train,ever and 2) I can't reserve a seat on this train, ever.  Their response was, basically, "try reserving a seat". Er, what? 

All I really wanted was an apology and maybe an indication that they'd look into why some of their trains are basically giant sardine cans at certain times. What I emphatically did not want or need was a response that said "try to do the thing that you've just told us you can't do".

I do understand that judging the right number if seats must be tricky (unless, perhaps you had data that told you how many people travelled each day and stuff, but where would you find a machine that could let you store and query so much data? Such a thing is beyond the ken of mortal men!), and there are technical issues like the length of platforms etc. to take into consideration. And that's fine, but if those are issues then tell me so, don't just try to suggest that the solution is to do something which has so far proved impossible.

To be frank if I hadn't seen the twitter response I probably wouldn't be posting this - the moral of the story being don't bother to respond to complaints if you're not going to read them properly anyway.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the service they provide I have no choice but to carry on using them. If any other service provider treated me like this I'd be off like a shot, but all I can do is moan about them; since I have to keep giving then my money anyway I doubt they care much.

So there we are. Such is my complaint, and having bleated it out I shall bid you goodnight.

I shall finish, however, on a positive note. On one of the journeys on the very train about which I am complaining, we were delayed slightly at birmingham new street. The guard declared over the tannoy, "we apologise for this slight delay. This was caused by incompetence." Nice to know there are some honest people working for them, at any rate.

Week the Second

In which our hero struggles a bit, and moans about it.

A boring title this week, because umm...I can't think of a better one.  And at least it's to the point.  If you'd rather not hear me moan about trains and software going wrong, skip the next 3 paragraphs and you'll be fine.

I thought about doing a day-by-day diary type thing for this week but decided not to because on some days nothing interesting enough happens to put in the blog, and that makes me look boring.  (Of course I am boring, but there's no need to advertise it to anybody that reads this).  I could list all the things I do at work, but "wrote a SQL case statement to flag bad email addresses" doesn't make good reading.

So this week.  It's been a bit of a struggle, to be honest.  Monday mornings are always a bit of a pain right now, since I have to get up at 4:30AM to catch a train, but I usually cope with it OK; and I did this week, but the journey was pretty horrendous.  Delayed by 45 minutes on one train by a broken level crossing, then on the next (which I shouldn't really have been on since it was a peak time train and I had an off peak ticket, but no guards checked - phew!) there was a problem with the points at Reading.  I felt a bit sorry for anybody that was actually going to change at Reading as they were just thrown off at Reading West and told "transport will be arranged to Reading", but that was as much info as they got before having to get off the train.

All in all, not a perfect start to the week; I got to work about an hour and a half after I usually do.  The day didn't really get much better either; a piece of software had gone wrong a little while before and it turned out it wasn't totally fixed, so I was still at work at 7pm fixing some of the consequences of that, but at least I'd made up the time I'd lost in the morning so I didn't have to go in super-early for the rest of the week.

Having checked in at the guesthouse I decided a bit of a run was in order; it was raining a bit, but not enough to stop me going out.  I decided to try the route that I'd tried a couple of times the previous week, but in reverse; it takes me down past the office where I work and then back to the guesthouse in a big circle.  I was really pleased to find that I could quite easily run (at a steady pace) to the office, but not so pleased when the sky decided that my new yellow running top was offensively bright and started to hurl rain at me.  I got soaked, but I felt good - I made it all the way around a circuit that I couldn't run 1/4 of the way around 2 weeks ago, and I only had to stop to clean my glasses so I could see where I was going (one of the lesser advertised perils of running in the rain - in the words of Blackadder, "so, some sort of hat is probably in order.").

On Tuesday I had another minor triumph - I went out for a 5.5k circuit after work with some folks from work, and shaved 3 or 4 minutes off the previous week's time (we weren't exactly keeping accurate time but it was a bit less and I only had to stop once to walk for a bit - 50% better than the previous week!).  I also bought some mouthwash that had the legend "avoid contact with any plastics" printed on the label, which was affixed to the bottle that the mouthwash came in.  Which was made of plastic.  Um.

Actually, on the subject of labels they've changed the sandwich supplier at work.  All of the Chicken/Beef/Ham sandwiches (which are labelled very clearly as beef/ham/chicken) now bear the legend "not suitable for vegetarians" on them.  You have to wonder what sort of vegetarian could buy a "Tandoori Chicken Sandwich" and think it was suitable for them.  (I know, I know, it's probably some sort of food rule thing, it just made me laugh).

Wednesday was a slightly odd day.  After work I made my usual call to my wife, who was having issues with printing something off the computer;  she's usually very patient (she works with kids so she has to be) but non-working computers turn her into a frothing lunatic with the patience of a rabid mongoose.  It didn't help that this was the week the kids went back to school, and therefore also the week that she went back to work; and I hate the helpless feeling I get when I'm hundreds of miles away and can't help (it was out of colour ink, in case you're wondering, but it wasn't easy to tell).  We didn't exactly have a row, but we were clearly getting on each other's nerves - just one of the hazards of working away from home I guess.

Anyway, after that I went for a run, but after about 1 and a half miles my legs started to protest, so I slowed to a walk.  At which point they started to ache really badly, until I ran again; they didn't hurt too much while I was running but they did feel really tired; so I would stop, and then they'd ache again.  I think this was their revenge for me making them do all that exercise when they've had 30 odd years of walking around perfectly happily without doing anything more strenuous than a brisk walk.

Since I was still a bit grumpy (and when I'm grumpy/upset/happy/sad I eat) from the aforementioned phone call I had chips from the chip shop for dinner.  But I did skip the full English breakfast at the guesthouse the next day, so that probably helped make up for it.

I skipped the running on Thursday; I'm going to try to do slightly longer distances but every other day next week (apparently you shouldn't increase it by more than about 10% a week), with maybe some low-impact stuff on one of the other nights (apparently Spinning is good).  I did wander into Basingstoke on the train, but I couldn't find any whizzy gadgets that I wanted to buy.  I was going to go to Nando's for dinner but it was heaving, so I ended up with my usual healthy stuf from Tesco (fruit, smoothie, low fat sandwich).  It's probably good for me, or something.  Actually it's not much of a penance since I really like fruit.

I think the less said about Friday's trip home the better.  On the Cross Country train from Basingstoke - Wolverhampton (part of the Bournemouth - Manchester route), I felt like they were trying to compress us into a neutron star or something.  Maybe Cross Country have some sort of game they play where they bet how many people they can actually fit onto a train?

The train is always bad seat-wise (and reservations are rarely forthcoming), but this week it was just appalling - I counted 15 people in the vestibule at the end of the carriage, and just as many in the adjoining one. It's not usually that bad, but I suspect it's because it was the first week people were back at work etc.

Anyway, I ran again today, felt a bit tired thanks to my trip home and having to stand still for 2 hours last night on the train so didn't do as well as I'd have liked; I think Saturdays are going to be a no-go for running just due to the tiredness.

And there we go - after saying I wouldn't I have ended up doing a day-by-day thing, and it probably was quite boring.  I shall try harder to think of funny stuff next week, honest.

A surprising alternative...

In which I make a decision that gives everybody a shock.  Including me.

About 6 weeks ago I started a new contract at a firm that shall not be named, working as a developer/database design/support monkee using a specialist piece of software that I have a fair amount of experience of.  It's a long way from home (4.5 hours on the train), so I have to stay down there during the week.  

If you're wondering what a support monkee is - we're the guys who tell you to turn it off and turn it back on again (which you've usually already tried, but when we tell you to do it it works.  This is because we have a Secret Button to press that makes it work).

This is hard because I have a wife and 3 kids, but I'm fortunate; the environment is great (no dress code - my line manager said "we might draw the line at a mankini", really relaxed and people trust you to get on with your job), the people are lovely and the money is good (we'll bypass the fact that I had no choice in the matter - it was literally take this contract or go bankrupt).  The guest house I'm staying in is also lovely; clean, comfortable rooms, friendly owners and a superb breakfast (http://www.oakleaguesthouse.co.uk), so that helps a lot too.

However, the big danger with living away from home in the week is eating too much and exercising too little, (and since I never exercise anyway...).  I know this because just after I started my first "proper" job (18 years or so ago) I had to go on a course for 4 weeks, during which all my food was effectively paid for by the company; when I started I was less than 10 stone, probably a bit less than I should have been but fairly slim and healthy; when I finished I was over 13 stone and I don't think I've ever been less than that since.

The problem is the evenings.  What can you do?  I'm working in a little village, where there a lot of very nice places to eat (if you're ever in Hampshire I can recommend http://www.thecrookedbilletpub.co.uk), and I love to eat; there are very few things I love more, in fact.

For the first couple of weeks I was wandering down to the pub at least twice a week, eating a big meal (often with a starter as well) and having a couple of pints.  Ok, the pub was 1.7 miles away from the guesthouse (thank you, Google Maps), but I was eating at least twice as much as a normal meal would be.  The only way this was going to end was with me being the size of a house, or possibly a mansion.

So, an alternative had to be found.  Something that I could do reasonably cheaply in the evenings, that would distract me from going out and eating and having a few pints.

Now, before I write the next sentence, you have to get the sort of person I am.  I have been a software developer for the last 10 years.  I have an extremely sedentary lifestyle, basically moving around slowly and eating large dinners.  I would rather have teeth pulled than take any kind of physical exercise, which I consider to be an evil almost on a par with Marketing executives (who are, in my world, somewhere on the other side of Satan and all his little wizards).

I have signed up to run the Reading Half-Marathon.

Let's just pause a moment to reflect on the enormity of this.  I, who could only be described as "fit as a fiddle" if the fiddle in question had just been run over by an articulated lorry and then dropped off the Empire State Building, have signed up to run 13 miles in not much more than 6 months.  I must be as mad as a badger on speed.

However, there is method in my madness (I hope!) - I'd already started running, just short distances, the week before last and then last week I went out with some of the guys from work and we did 5.5k (in about 40 minutes, which is very slow but they did have me with them to slow them down!).  It was, from my point of view, extremely satisfying; it was great to feel that I could run that far (I only had to slow to a walk twice I think, and that was for breathing rather than bodily pain).

The thing is, I'm really bad at keeping stuff up (fnar fnar) unless I have an objective in sight; the half-marathon effectively gives me a deadline by which I must be fit, and should encourage me to keep the exercise regime up.  Plus it's a choice between getting even fatter (and I don't want to go there) and doing something vaguely constructive with my free evenings.

So I thought I'd pinch a leaf out of my friend Nicki's blog over at skinnyblog, and keep you lot updated on the ups and downs of my attempt to get fit enough to run what seems like a very long way.  Hopefully this will also give the blog a bit more of a focus rather than me posting when something annoys me....time will tell.

I'm not following any diet or particular exercise regime; I'll be trying to eat sensibly, and allowing myself one night out a week plus the rather nice breakfasts in the guest house (which probably contain my entire GDA of fat for the day in any case).  The guys at work are aiming to run 5k at least twice a week to start with as of next week, building it up to 10k by Christmas and then tapering it a bit as the event itself approaches.  I'll try to keep you updated on here as to how I'm doing...if I suddenly stop posting I've either a) died or b) got bored.

Oh, the surprising bit - apart from that I'm doing it at all -  is that so far I've actually enjoyed the exercise.  At least when it's stopped...