Wet cold and flu

On your marks!

There we were lined up for the off - a bit like the start of the Grand National this. I wouldn't normally edit my blog in such a way that a photo would stray across the page - doesn't look very tidy does it?  However this panoramic snap just needed to be seen in its entirety. No that's not me heaving under the goal posts, I'm at the other end with the green sleeves trying to plot a dryish route through the mud. Vicky is nowhere to be seen - she was hanging back in the trees behind waiting for the mad trampling to be over so she could then deftly thread her way through the field with Skip. It was a grim wet muddy course through Henley Woods at Oswestry. It's probably quite lovely in summer and that's probably the next time we'll be back for this one. Still it was friendly enough - there seems to be a real community spirit here as evidenced by the large number of cheerful volunteers. Plenty of junior runners prepared to get muddy legs on a cold morning so someone must be inspiring them to get out of bed early on a Saturday.

Saltaire - it's not by the sea you know!

Later that week, prior to a pleasant day's work in Bradford, I spent an evening in Shipley a rather interesting suburb. Part of Shipley is a World Heritage Site - how about that! This is the area known as Saltaire, the name is a hybrid word derived from the River Aire and Sir Titus Salt, who built a model village here to house his workers. The houses were a significant improvement on the slums of the time - they had running water! Much survives for tourists to peek at, however it was windy, wet and rainy so I decided not to stroll the mile or so up to Saltaire and I settled for the Wetherspoons over the road for some Goose Eye Chinook Blonde. Last week I was in a pub called the Sir John Arderne in Newark, you might think it fitting therefore that Wetherpsoons would have called this one the Sir Titus Salt. But there was already a Wetherspoons called the Sir Titus Salt in Bradford so they came up with the moniker Sir Norman Rae to commemorate another scion of Shipley. Rae was a wool merchant who gave a parcel of land to Shipley council to use as a park - there's no parkrun in it yet! One curiosity that I gleaned about Shipley is that, until this year the past 14 years worth of councillors from Shipley have all belonged to the Green Party - must be some interesting reason for that but I didn't get a chance to find out.

Or else!

So I have this in writing from the NHS website - "If you have what you think is flu after vaccination it may be that you have caught a flu-like virus that isn't really flu, or you may have caught flu before you had the flu vaccination." I had the jab on Thursday morning, 3 o'clock the following morning what did I have? Something horrible!! I actually think what the NHS suggested is not quite right, the flu jab knocked my immune system out which meant that a lurking common cold, which I would have perhaps normally shrugged off, then grabbed me big time. I could live with that alone but unfortunately this all put my heart out of sync. So no parkrun for me this Saturday. I stayed in bed while Vicky did her volunteering bit as tailwalker at Bodelwyddan parkrun.