Ted’s Ice Cream van!

Good morning folks

I trust you are in fine fettle.
Here is a wrap-up of recent events and happenings.

A quiet-ish time. The lurgy gave way to back issues, so not much running action.
One BIG day out made up for everything though 🙂

Ted’s Ice Cream Van & ON THE BACK FOOT PODCAST LIVE!

How on earth do I even start to explain this one?

The youngster and I have been involved with a fellrunning podcast called ON THE BACK FOOT for a while now, our main slot is a generally light hearted/nonsensical look at what people eat when they are “Munching on the moors”. It is good fun and we both love it. Jacob Tonkin is the main man of the show, who took over from Charlie Barker, who won the Pools and moved to Devon to join the circus. Bobby Gard Storry is another star of the show. Awesome people who we have got to know this year.

Anyway, the British Fell Running Association (FRA) relays were held at on Ted Mason’s farm. in Appletreewick this year, in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales.
Ted is an outstanding runner (& cricketer, and rugby player and an all round Sport Billy, plus a good dancer and he is also outstanding at climbing up to the top of Big Tops/Marquees, but that is another story).

I have known Ted for 20+ years, he is a fellrunning legend.
The team worked their backsides off to get everything ready and it was an absolute showcase for fellrunning, an amazing day.

The FRA Relays are a BIG event, the end of season relays are more fiercely contended/contested than the World Cup. It is different to normal individual races, you have to absolutely bury yourself for your club. It is where all the best teams of British fellrunning come together in teams of 6, running 4 legs, all starting and finishing in the same place, which was, right in front of a green ice cream van used by Appletreewick Cricket Club and although not serving ice creams anymore, it is decked out for sound, so Ted asked Jacob to bring his OTBF team along to do the commentary!

So, having absolutely zero experience of commentary, we composed a song for each team (thankfully Jacob, Bobby & Darren were all experts at actually commentating!)

I actually started scribbling songs a week before the relays and thought I was ready for the big day until I glanced at the entry list on the Thursday night and saw an additional 22 teams, so it was a late night.

I won’t go into the full details here, but if you listen to OKTOBERFEST, it is all in there 🙂

Definitely our best day out of the year 🙂

p.s. ust what is “THE BROWN COW”? Find out on the podcast above!

Jog on?
So, the grand finale to the fellrunning season (for me) was supposed to have been something like:

Peris Horseshoe – Langdale Horseshoe – Tour of Pendle.

However, after the lurgy has disappeared I picked up a mysterious back injury and all the shops shut early for my season! (Although Langdale did sound like a grim exercise this year!)

Tour of Pendle is a great bogtrotting curtain closer, but I just have no miles in my legs, so my last race will be DUNNERDALE.

Never run it, have heard good things about it, taking Lina for a trot round her first proper fell race, so I am looking forward to it.

In my quest to become as bulletproof as humanly possible, I am regularly torturing myself in my lounge with various instruments of S&C pain, the latest being a plyo box.

All good fun!

New wheels.

Nostalgia is a bloody powerful thing!

I learned to drive in a Nissan Micra, my first car was a Nissan Micra, we drove to Mongolia in a Nissan Micra. I have had 6 Micras in total and none were duffers. After the Honda Jazz debacle that we don’t mention, I bought the little red one from a very nice man in Kettering.
It was a brilliant car and never missed a beat (as Micras don’t), but…
We needed more space, after the Tetris/Rubik’s cube exercise that was packing-our-car-for-the-summer-holiday, where the poor Nipper had about a foot square space in the back!

I won’t bore you with all hours and hours and hours of ebay browsing and all the non-starters, duffers and plain old wrecks that I trawled.
The big news is that the Micra has gone 😦
Sold to a man in London, (I never get a simple local sale on ebay).
To be replaced by Berty the Berlingo, bought from a friendly car salesman called Nick from Castleford. I have never bought from a car dealer before, but it was easy as pie, he even delivered it to our house.

I wanted a van, and had been looking for an unhealthy amount of time for one, but they had all been ragged to death to Jupiter and back, plus we needed something we could use on a daily basis, so the Berlingo is a good compromise.
Thanks to Aly for the tip 🙂

Planning a big road trip next summer 🙂

Met our match?

Fishing has been light this year. We have only been a handful of times and maybe we have both lost a bit of enthusiasm for the sport, but the last junior match of the year popped up on a free weekend, on a nearby pond, so went along. There were only 4 others, all mad keen young and experienced teenage Anglers (all with very keen and competitive Fisherman dads), then there were us 2 chancers!

Valentina started catching a fish every cast and at one point we thought she was going to pull off a remarkable victory!

However, all the fish were tiny little tiddlers and as results go on total weight and not quantity, it wasn’t to be. Cracking day out though 🙂

Trick or treat???

Another year, another make-up job!
Pushing my pronouns to their limits this year with a bit of cross dressing.
Valentina did my make-up, but as every year, I am still disappointed that this face slap doesn’t dissolve overnight, it takes as long to get off as it does to put on!

A good time was had by all and nobody died!

Joker part II

Continuing with the theme of make-up, but with more casualties than a kid’s halloween party, went to the pictures to see the latest Joker film.
I loved the first one, although it was at the cinema in Peru, when I was wearing my infamous mail order “Colourblind, I thought it was blue and it was closer to silver” Elvis suit, and we arrived late and there was only space on the front row, and Lina thought that (apart from all the killing bits) that the film reflected me a bit too closely for comfort!

Moving on to the new “Joker Folie Deux“, which opened to mixed reviews, although I am no Barry Norman, I thought it was definitely worth a watch.
If you want a film to make you feel better about yourself, but not in a Jennifer Aniston way, go and see it, now!

Raider’s round-up

Life is always an emotional roller coaster being a Barrow Raiders fan!
Nothing is ever easy nor clear cut and as expected it went to the very last match/points difference/relying on another team to lose, to avoid the drop, but we survived.

A gutsy performance against Widnes was a losing one (just), but Swinton did us a favour and lost, so we live on for another season in the Championship.