Top and tail work shifts for Bank Holiday Monday.
Kate Tempest kept me company on the 8am.
How has she so far managed to pass me by?
Let Them Eat Chaos is acquired listening. I look forward to acquiring more of her words and music.
Work tools were downed, and the brilliant blue sky Essex morning meant that a bicycle ride was called for.
The shout went out of:
“To Tollesbury!”
Where is Tollesbury?
We have been inspired by the 350 Miles book to cast our Essex reach out a little further. Tollesbury appeared on the radar, just a short ride off the usual Abberton Reservoir route.
I took out the Tourer for what was a sharp January morning. Two pairs of tights were called for.
The frost finally started to lift when we reached Fingringhoe. I took this as the opportunity to increase the pace - to keep warm, rather than to make up any time.
We reached Tollesbury around an hour and 45 minutes later. I had planned for a two hour ride.
It was quite beautiful down by the salt marshes, but absolutely bloody cold.
The plan was to spend an hour or so exploring. But this was a morning to keep moving on two wheels, and not two feet.
We did the Tollesbury thing in under five minutes flat, and then swiftly turned back the way we came.
A summer return is highly likely.
We stopped off at the pool, clocking up 64km in total. Not bad for a morning on the bicycle.
I put in a lame 30 lengths, and then fell asleep in the sauna.
I made it back to base with an hour or so of daylight left. We both made a start on the pruning of the back garden wisteria.
The Samson moment for Mr Wisteria leaves it looking a little limp. Previous summers have taught me though to trust in the power of the pruning: it will return stronger.
I wish that the same could be said of my hair.
I did a little audio admin in the office. I set up some RSS feeds for the various school audioboom accounts, which are then linked to Dropbox via IFTTT. The idea is that all content is automatically placed in Dropbox, and then archived.
This was around three years ago.
I had forgotten about this feed until today. I checked it, and yep, all three are still working.
Good old audioboom, good old Dropbox.
You never know when in the future someone might want to listen to some Year 1 kids reading out their Christmas poetry.
I caught the second half of the Man Utd match, and then DARTS before the tail end of the working day made a re-appearance.