- It’s the end of summer, and you know what that means, more summer. Like a lovely few days of swanning around in a t-shirt…in September!
- Had a fair lot of running to do this week to get to my stupid target of 42km a week. My brain works in a way where it hears a thing it likes and goes “That’s it, that’ll do”. No one is making me run this far, but I’m kinda enjoying it and I might be near 2000km by the end of the year.
- Went to a lovely meetup hosted by my ex-boss Ed. Met some other product managers and we all chatted about work and stuff and listened to some great short talks about peoples career paths. It was in Planes studio, which was lovely, and had the good snacks.
- Oh, my excellent mum stayed with us for a few days, and we had a laugh about grand designs and the kids loved having her around. She went to a design exhibition I recommended, but didn’t enjoy it and said it was weird because there were no explanations of the pieces.
- At the weekend I rode a 265km mostly off-road route, the north downs way, with a long-time-good friend, Lachie (who, and I break some sort of fourth wall here, also plays the character “Poor Lachie” in Alice’s much lauded weeknotes). Also, in a few previous episodes of these weeknotes
- Cycling a long way is fun because you get to eat anything and everything you ever want, with no judgement. Like buckets of Haribo, endless flapjacks and cereal bars. Eat little and often, eat a lot often, it doesn’t matter, just eat as much as you can to keep your likkle legs a-turning.
- Turns out you also drink more water than you ever thought you would need to drink. Most often, places like Morrisons cafe, a shell garage, a local pub, are fine with just refilling your water bottles for you.
- At one point we met a lad in the forest who had bought a brand new gas burner so he could play hunter/gatherer, supplying hot cups of tea to him and his partner. He’d forgotten the damn lighter, nightmare. They were marshalling for the british heart foundation off-road london-brighton and were stationed in the middle of a dense native woodland. Out of nowhere, us lycra-clad, mucky saviours turn up and give him a working lighter and all is healed. He gave us nutrigrains as ‘payment’ which we obviously wolfed down later.
- Also at 3am or some ridiculous hour, woken by thunder in our lightweight, aluminium poled tent we judged how safe we were by checking https://www.lightningmaps.org/ Turns out if lightening striking is all around you and you’re in a metal poled tent, lying down, you should probably get up and go find somewhere safer.
- We got to a wet Dover, had a damp photo, went to get posh fish and chips from Marco Piere-white’s gaff. Obviously, in a move so classically Modern-British, all trains from Dover were cancelled and replaced by a “rail replacement bus”. We cancelled our chips and a quick trip to Dover station confirmed that our bikes would not be allowed on these busses, sort of ruining the idea that they could replace a train. So we loaded our tired, damp limbs onto our bikes to ride the 13km back over the hills to Folkstone to join the next train back to London. A fitting end to an adventure weekend.