Walk to Sainsburys at the Hub, and back, total distance 7.9 miles

In an attempt to walk a decent distance so that I’d hopefully sleep better last night (this year is the first I’ve ever had trouble sleeping – could be the worldwide pandemic and associated restrictions, or could be my hormones – of all the things to collide with 2020), I chose to walk to a supermarket in the town centre rather than to my local Tesco. The walk is 3-4 miles depending on the route chosen, and it’s impossible to pick a route that doesn’t involve some trudging along redways (well, not without making it about 8 miles). To attempt to liven it up, I took some photos en route.

Outward route, 4.4 miles, via Bancroft and Bradwell

The footpath leading from Southern Way to the H2:

'MK Museum' sign, and an engine, at the junction of the H2 and McConnell Drive:

The remains of the Roman villa at Bancroft:

Some cute thatched cottages in Bradwell village:

Dull stretch of redway past the Rooksley Retail Park:

In central MK, crossing Silbury Boulevard:

And finally, approaching the Hub:

Return route, 3.5 miles, via Bradwell Common and Heelands

Fewer pictures on the return route, as a) I was carrying shopping slightly uphill and felt less inclined; and b) neither Bradwell Common nor Heelands is very scenic.

Through the windswept Hub after leaving Sainsburys:

Looking across Silbury Boulevard to MK Magistrates' Court:

Long final stretch heading north on the V6: footbridge with aqueduct beyond:

Well, that was it really. I balanced out the effects of the walk with tea and biscuits.

Lockdown(s)

Well, we in England are in lockdown again, but Boris has assured us that it’ll definitely end on 2 December, and we’ve no reason to doubt his word. Oh, wait.

Lockdown started on 5 November. I travelled to Reading last weekend to see Ruth under the ‘support bubble’ rules and noted that she had marked the date on the calendar (and her hair appointment was unfortunately cancelled, which caused some anguish). Additionally, all our weekend arrangements for November had a line through them and a terse ‘NOPE’ written in capitals alongside.

This lockdown is, thankfully, less strict than the first time round, which is something. I'm particularly appreciative of the 'bubble' rules and the 'unlimited exercise' stipulation. Unlike certain other parts of the UK, England never did have rules confining you to within a certain distance from your house, instead seeming to urge people to use some common sense (e.g. driving 10 minutes to take your kids to the park = fine; driving three hours to the Peak District = not fine). 

Not sure I'm comfortable longer-term though with the idea of the state giving us permission to sit on a bench (snip taken from the 'look what you're allowed to do this time' BBC link above). Have been struck this year by the realisation that my innate libertarian tendencies fit less well than I'd realised with the left-of-centre Guardian-type politics that I'd always assumed were my natural home. Plenty of time this year for personal reflection, if nothing else.

'Households' malarkey

Following a bit of an anxiety attack when lockdown was announced in March I skipped off to Reading to stay with Ruth at the house (catastrophizing that we’d be banned from seeing each other indefinitely if I didn’t – the ‘bubble’ rule wasn’t introduced until later). I stayed there for most of the lockdown period – the first continuous period we’d lived with each other in nine years – but we got on OK, probably due to being distracted from domestic minutiae onto bigger concerns.

After a couple of months we decided that we’d both be better off if we returned to our normal routine – plus I had already left my rented flat empty for quite some time by that point, albeit I’d been in touch with the agents to notify them – so I returned to MK. We’ve now officially ‘bubbled’ with each other, with an eye to any future lockdowns/’tier’ changes. We’re lucky in that we both live alone so are free to do this; I can’t imagine what it’s like for younger couples in (say) London where neither party can afford to live alone and therefore are prevented from seeing each other.

Running

Started off this year quite well, running with the Redway Runners’ ‘Gentle Step Up’ groups on Mondays and Wednesdays. Here’s a selfie I took before one group run in early March, where I was clearly feeling less than enthusiastic about it. Also did one, or possibly two, parkruns with Hai. When both parkrun and the RR meetups got clobbered by the lockdown, I decided that I’d have to try getting over my self-consciousness about running alone. I more or less have, helped by the variety of shapes, sizes and ages one sees out running. I’m now running two or three times a week, more or less regularly, though have had to switch to lunchtime runs now that it’s darker. I’m only running just over 3km at a time, but I figure it’s better than not doing it at all.

Ruth also took up running during lockdown while her gym was closed, and had some success working through the ‘Couch to 5K’ programme. Sadly, her gym hasn’t reopened, so she’s faced with having to join another one further away, or keep up the running.

Bloody devolution

Devolution is, obviously, a really great thing for all concerned (albeit that the Welsh voted 'yes' to it in 1997 by an even slimmer majority than the UK voted for Brexit). But for those of us with family in a different nation of the UK, things have been much more complicated than they surely needed to be. It’s been enough of a headache trying to keep track of lockdown rules in England, but Zoom calls with my parents over this period have been partly spent comparing what we’re respectively allowed to do (exclaiming that it’s so nice that we can now do X, before being told that the other party can’t yet do X, but can however do Y, which you can’t do). As I write this, my mother was originally due to visit me in Reading a week next Saturday – she has now been released from her lockdown, so is now free to travel, except that I’m now in lockdown, so she can’t. At least, I assume she’s free to travel; the First Minister does seem quite keen on restricting the Welsh populace to within a specified distance of their houses. 

Additionally, the Welsh are still not allowed anyone inside their homes apart from the other household in their 'bubble'. Who knows whether things will be any different by Christmas. My already heightened anxiety levels weren't helped by all the 'Wales Is Closed' publicity during the spring lockdown; probably just as well I had Ruth around during this period (Me: OMG I'M NEVER GOING TO SEE MY PARENTS AGAIN; Ruth: Yes you are. Now eat your dinner.). 

Waitrose new branding

I spent some of the earlier period of lockdown focusing on the really important stuff by kvetching about the rebranding Waitrose have done of all their products – away from a slick, modern-looking font (the chickpeas on the left below) to a pointless new one consisting of capital letters. Is this something to do with Brexit?

And this flour. TCHOH.

Knitting

Back in March/April, clearly desperate to have something distracting to do, I did some knitting, for the first time in many years. I discovered a partially-made hat I’d evidently started making for my old Teddy, so finished this. Mum has also done some knitting and made a blanket and pillow for Alys’ woolly rabbit, plus possibly other things.

I didn’t manage much else other than some frenzied rows on a piece of practice knitting I’d kept to practice different stiches on.

I considered making Ruth this charming bedjacket, but she didn’t seem enthusiastic.

Easter

We bought each other Easter chocolate. The Lindt bunny was of course mine; the Dairy Milk was Ruth’s. Ruth has common tastes in a couple of areas, chocolate being one. (Gravy being another – she actually prefers Bisto to gravy made from the joint. Bizarre, and a bit Toby Carvery.)

Duolingo

I’d used this cute language-learning app previously but downloaded it again at the start of lockdown and did a few weeks of ‘practising’ my (basic) German. My mum has also downloaded the app and has been using it to refresh her Welsh. I’ve advised her to turn off its notifications though as Duolingo does tend towards passive-aggressive messages if you miss too many days' practice; Mum says she got one the other day saying ‘Duolingo is sad’.

Folded bags

I folded my supply of Bags for Life into small triangles, following a YouTube video on how to fold bags into small triangles.

Home deliveries

Ruth and I selflessly supported a local business by ordering many takeaway pizzas from Papa Gee in Caversham (via Deliveroo). Their ‘puttanesca’ pizza is truly excellent.

This one sounds a bit weird though:

On returning to my flat in late May and going through the post, I was surprised to discover I'd been sent an HIV test kit, before realizing that it wasn’t for me but for the same-numbered flat in the block opposite. Of all the things to wrongly deliver. Unfortunately, having opened it without checking who it was addressed to, I was then too embarrassed to deliver it to its correct recipient. Ruth advised just handing it over while avoiding his eyes, but I chickened out even of doing that. I hope he managed to order another one.

Ancient spices

A sort out of the spice rack at the house revealed this surely record-breakingly expired jar of black onion seed. It must be the single jar remaining from the original spice rack, which I think was a present from Ray’s mother back in the 1990s.

Instagram followers

I now have a whole 40 followers on Instagram, though Ruth maintains disparagingly that lots of them must be bots.

Reading

Have managed to do more reading than usual this year, for obvious reasons and also because while at the house with Ruth we only had the one TV, so retiring with a book for a portion of each evening seemed the easiest compromise. Looking back at my records I’ve averaged two books a month and hit a high point of four in April. Still have quite a hefty ‘to read’ pile though.

Work

Like many companies, when lockdown was announced in March the OU switched everyone except a skeleton staff to working from home. Some groups of staff have since returned to campus, but no one doing my sort of role, as it’s considered that we can do that just as well from home. Indeed we probably can, and working from home certainly has some upsides, but personally I don’t want to be working from home full-time on a permanent basis. Hoping that some sort of ‘mix’ arrangement can be arrived at in future involving perhaps a couple of days a week in the office. The noises are hopeful, but we’ve been told we won’t be returning to campus at all until next spring, and encouraged to make our home offices as amenable as possible. (A colleague of mine did ponder whether he could ask for funding to build an extension to his house in order to achieve this, but I've a feeling that didn't go anywhere.)

Temporary workstation at the house

I’m luckier than many as my MK flat has a spare bedroom which provides a pleasant workspace. While at the house in Reading in the first couple of months of the lockdown, I set up on one end of the dining table (Ruth has her home office in the attic) and Ruth kindly lent me her second monitor as I’m used to working with two screens. Now that I’m back at my flat I’ve bought my own monitor, justifying it as an essential lockdown purchase, and have also upgraded my broadband from a cheapish TalkTalk deal to a BT Fibre package – more expensive, but three or four times as fast, which is great and improves video calls via Teams (work) and Zoom (family).

Workspace at my flat

As if lockdown wasn’t stressful enough, I decided to apply for a new job. It was an internal role that I had been aware would be coming up; the eventual timing was slightly irritating but I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to apply for it. As I had a few concerns about my past interview performances I booked a (virtual) session with an interview coach and had a number of sessions with Ruth where I practiced the ‘tell me about a time when’ questions beloved of competency-based interviews. The prospect of an interview via MS Teams had been a bit daunting but in the end the unusual setup was probably helpful as it lent a surreal air to the proceedings which actually removed some of the tension, especially when the head of the panel vanished just as I was finishing my answer to the first question (he reappeared a minute or so later, apologizing for the state of his broadband).

Interviewing as an internal candidate always has an additional layer of strangeness as you are often being interviewed by people who know you, as indeed was the case on this occasion. I can never actually decide whether that makes things easier or more challenging. Depends what sort of a reputation you’ve carved out thus far, I guess.

Ruth and I spent some time working out where I could sit that would ensure I had a neutral background and was adequately lit, and she came up with the idea of sitting by the window in the second bedroom and putting my laptop on the ironing board (as we don’t have a desk on the first floor). This felt slightly ridiculous but actually worked fine. When I confessed the setup to one of the panel afterwards, he assured me that he'd had no idea, which was a relief.

And in the event I did get the job, which I was mightily pleased about, so since early September have been a Statistical Analyst in the Data Science and Strategic Analytics team. So far it’s proving an agreeable change.

 

Roll on 2 December.

Walk via the Buckingham Arm and the Stratfords, 5.4 miles

I have this week off. The original plan was to be on a family holiday near Harlech, then that got commuted to visiting my parents for a few days; now that all activities involving being in Wales are temporarily off limits, I am having a useful week at home in my MK flat. As I spent much of Tuesday defrosting the fridge-freezer (which seemed to take hours and I was reduced to jabbing at the final intransigent slab of ice with a wooden spatula), I decided to get out for a walk yesterday.

One of the now-ruined train sheds along the canal at Wolverton

I was keen to see what work had been done at the Cosgrove end of the disused Buckingham Arm of the Grand Union, as the Buckingham Canal Society has plans to get it rewatered and reopened (as noted on this earlier walk in January when Ray and I walked the rewatered bit at the Buckingham end). According to Matt, the Society has negotiated permission to divert the canal from its original route (now blocked by the A5) to a position a bit further along where there would be room for it to pass under the road. It’ll be interesting to see if that happens though it looks like a seriously long-term labour of love for the volunteers.

The Buckingham Arm leaving the main canal at Cosgrove

I started out west along the canal from Wolverton Park as far as the lock at Cosgrove, where you have to walk over the lock gates to join the footpath that runs along part of the Buckingham Arm. Only quite a short stretch has been rewatered so far. The rewatered stretch runs as far as a bridge, which is clearly a focus of current work. Beyond the bridge, the canal still has water in it for a while, but this eventually peters out.

Bridge works at the end of the rewatered section

Still some water at this point, but presumably not navigable

I followed the towpath for a while, beyond the point where the canal bed has any water in it, and then turned off to follow a path across fields coming out near the footbridge over the A5 that leads into Old Stratford.

Path leading across a field

Old Stratford always appears a little bit the poor relation of the rather nice Stony Stratford a little way along the road closer to Milton Keynes. Both were developments along the Roman road Watling Street, the original course of the A5 before it was diverted onto a new grade-separated dual carriageway through Milton Keynes.

I diverted briefly in Old Stratford to look at a housing development off Deanshanger Road (something I’d spotted on a recent Rightmove browse) then walked into Stony via the river path and past the apartments at The Mill. Caught a bus back to Wolverton to cut out the tedious trudge back along Stratford Road.

Once back in Wolverton, I was surprised to see one of the Starship robots coming towards me as I hadn’t seen one of those this far north before. I’m guessing old districts like Wolverton aren’t as well suited to them as the newer bits of MK with their wide-open redways. This one continued coming straight for me but thankfully turned aside at the last minute, saving me having to step into the road.

Approaching robot

My route in red below. Start point at Wolverton Park in green; end point at the bus stop in Stony in red. The pointy tip is where I turned off the main canal onto the Buckingham Arm.

Unstructured

Unsolicited health-related emails

At various points over the last year or so I’ve found myself signed up to something called SELF Daily and to the Patient Access mailing list. I think I’ve now unsubscribed from SELF, but still seem to be signed up to Patient Access, although I never do more than skim it. 

If you were previously feeling OK about being middle-aged, some of the emails I've received from these lists seem to have been designed to put you right about this forthwith. Here are some particular gems:

FFS.

Phthisis

I don’t really know much about the 11-plus exam, though both my parents took it in their day and successfully got in to their local grammar school. Buckinghamshire is one of the small number of English counties that retains the 11-plus and grammar schools (here's a list of them), so I’ve occasionally been aware of colleagues at the OU talking about it. Milton Keynes doesn’t have a grammar school, which I guess is in line with its ethos; also they’d probably stopped building new ones by the time MK was set up.

My clever mum was recently talking about her 11-plus - which, evidently, she took a year early – and related how she had clinched it by correctly spelling ‘phthisis’, despite it being a word she’d (unsurprisingly) never heard before. It’s a sufficiently unusual word to immediately take me back to my A-level English Literature syllabus, which included a number of T. S. Eliot poems, including Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, which is the only place I’ve seen this word (it means: consumptive, afflicted by a wasting disease). MedicineNet has it that it’s pronounced TIE-sis, which I’m sure is correct though it’s sufficiently obscure nowadays for anyone coming across it to pronounce it phonetically.

Anyway, Burbank. A seedy tale of something or other – like many of Eliot’s poems, it was clearly not intended to be comprehensible by the mere mortal. Snip is of the copy of it that I studied for my A-level, together with explanatory notes made at the time.

Estate agents' random capitalisation

What is wrong with them? Just a few snips from Rightmove:

And while we’re on the topic, what the hell is a ‘family bathroom’? One that comes with a couple of kids?

Old Zip Coon

Ruth and I ended up in a conversation recently about ‘Singing Together’, the BBC radio show for schools that we both remembered from our primary schools, though I don’t think that at my school we tuned in to the live show – as I recall, teachers used to record the episodes and then play them back to the class on a cassette player at a convenient time. This is an interesting BBC article about the series. Shame that so few episodes survive in the archives.

I remembered several songs from ‘Singing Together’ during my last year at primary school, including 'Johnny Todd' and the charmingly-named ‘Old Zip Coon’. I found a recording of a song of this name on YouTube, though with different words to the song I remember. Pancocojams notes that the stirring chorus beginning 'O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day' was the source of the much later song 'Zip A Dee Do Da', as written for the now-blacklisted 1946 Disney movie 'Song of the South'.

I *think* the version sung by Al Bernard in the video clip here is the one we sang with 'Singing Together', and the version #2 lyrics look about right. As a class I seem to remember OZC being voted our favourite song from that series’ collection. I also seem to remember that our class teacher Mrs Duff forgot to record the final episode where the winning song was announced, so we never found out the winner. She was quite apologetic.

Nest, purveyor of cute/threatening products

Ruth purchased a 'Nest Protect' smoke alarm a while back, part of the Nest range of Smart Home products (I believe Nest has since been taken over by Google). It works on the house WiFi and links to a phone app, which helpfully sends a notification to your smartphone if your house is ablaze. As per this a while back when some cooking had created a certain amount of smoke that had filtered out to the hallway. The alarm itself is a lot politer than old-style smoke alarms – it doesn’t just go off in crude fashion, but first a voice cautions that the smoke levels mean it will soon go off, and warns that it’s quite loud, giving you about enough time to shriek and open all the windows.

'Nest Protect' in our hallway

Helpful notifications from the Nest app

Was somewhat alarmed to receive a similar ‘smoke clearing’ message the other week while sitting in my MK flat. Texted Ruth asking if she had set the house on fire, but it turned out she’d just overheated some butter while sautéeing potatoes for her dinner.

Ruth has resisted buying any further Nest products, particularly the cute but faintly sinister Nest Cam, which keeps an eye on your home, meaning, presumably, that you could potentially watch live footage of your home being burgled from the helpless vantage point of a holiday in Tenerife. As, possibly, could the Cam's previous owner, if you've made the mistake of buying a used one. Although some Smart Home products sound intriguing, this American couple's experience is enough to put you off having a fully-featured smart home. Similar to the media stuff about Alexa emitting random maniacal laughter.