Tag: New Year

Not the best of starts

At some point between Christmas and New Year, the dreaded Coronavirus finally caught up with Commando and he, being a sharing kind of man, kindly passed it on to me. Thankfully, for all concerned, it was not nearly as bad as expected. Yes, it was worse than the cold I had a few weeks earlier, although with less snottiness, hacking, and coughing. The main feature appears to have been tiredness, a woolly head incapable of concentrating for any length of time and a few olfactory anomalies that have made eating an interesting venture.

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A fresh start

There’s something to be said for starting the day off with a nice walk. When that day also happens to be the first day of a new year, doubly so. It helped that the first day of 2022 dawned crisp and cold, a truly golden start to the year. After all the madness of the last two years, I hoped this was a good omen for the year ahead. I’m fairly sure I wasn’t alone in being tired of all the panic, rumour, conspiracy theories and restrictions at this stage. Commando and I strolled across the Common, admiring the layers of gold, grey and blue through the bare branches of the trees. The wonderful Gareth had already been round putting out his signs and the set up crew were on the flats putting out the poles and chains of the parkrun finish funnel. The sky was the real star of the show though. It looked like being a beautiful morning, which was just as well, because drizzle would have put a dampener on my plans.

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The Five parkruns of Christmas

Christmas 2018

For runners slightly obsessed with collecting parkrun milestone t-shirts, the parkruns of Christmas must seem like an extra Christmas present. There’s no other time of year when you can squeeze in a cheeky midweek parkrun or even two in one day and those extra runs certainly help rack up the numbers.

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Happy New Year

1 January 2018

First thing on New Years Day all the sensible people are in bed sleeping off a late night, too much food and way too much alcohol. My warm bed was just a hazy memory as I strolled across Southampton Common, wrapped up against the chilly morning air. For some reason the parkrun organisers thought it would be a good idea to have an extra parkrun today. In fact there were two, one at Netely and one st Southampton, with the Netley one starting before the Southampton one so people could run both. Continue reading Happy New Year

The five parkruns of Christmas, almost

December 2016

The Christmas period seemed to be one long whirl of parkruns, one after the other. The first was on Christmas Eve. England felt incredibly warm after Iceland, even though everyone else was shivering and complaining about the cold. It seemed odd to be getting up at the crack of dawn and actually seeing pink skies instead of darkness too.  Continue reading The five parkruns of Christmas, almost

Signing on – first published 2 January 2013

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2013 was finally over and it was a year I was glad to see the back of. 2014 came in with a bang in Southampton. At midnight we opened the back door to let 2013 out and open the champagne. It was raining. We opened the front door to welcome 2014 in, look at the fireworks and listen to the boats. We didn’t stay out long because the rain started teeming down. As we sat back down in front of the fire there was a flash of lightening and a tremendous clap of thunder and all hell broke loose with the rain. We hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come, 2013 had been stormy enough thank you very much. Continue reading Signing on – first published 2 January 2013