One of the best museums in the whole country and recently proclaimed THE best tourist site in Wiltshire (beating out the likes of Stonehenge, Avebury, and the Salisbury Cathedral), STEAM is on my doorstep…literally less than 10 minutes stroll from my front door and yet I haven’t been there this entire year…a matter corrected Saturday. [...]

I’ve been sick with a vile upper respiratory infection for two weeks now; Jackie had it, too, but offset by a week so I can confirm by the matching trajectories (low grade fever for a couple of days overlapping ever-increasing congestion, nausea, and fairly high fever, then body aches and tightness in chest leading to, [...]

On a one day consultancy callout to my old job at Cambridge I took two days to arrived early, relaxed, and to get a nice run and a few new pubs under my belt beforehand.  I had some issues with a new computer for the wife which put my escape from Swindon back a couple [...]

It is a small bar, but Off the Rails has everything you could ask of a local: good beer, friendly publican, a couple of good ciders and it’s right on public transport…literally on the platform of the rail station.  We had twenty minutes until the train so I got a Rich’s Farmhouse Cider and settled [...]

I didn’t really need another beer and this was more of a café than a pub, but I couldn’t possibly resist a bar named Steamers (see this Urban Dictionary entry if you aren’t already smirking).  I got a Grolsch which was green.  Not the container but the beer itself: for the uninitiated, when you store [...]

  I met the wife after her conference and we grabbed a bite then an early train back to London, and as we were not only on advanced sales tickets for a late train from Paddington Station to Swindon (reserved seating means you can only use the train for which you are scheduled) but that [...]

The morning of Jackie’s conference I started reading some papers on structure and function of GABA receptors, membrane proteins in the blood/brain interface that act as ion pumps when insulted by the blood chemistry of, for instance, alcohol consumption.  Inspired to think about something besides my aching legs and ready to do a biochemistry experiment [...]

A couple of hours after a set of 400m repeats at the Oxford University track on Tuesday I started to feel ill with a fever and congestion accompanied by a sore throat.  These became progressively worse as the work week continued and I left early Friday, staying in bed until noon Saturday, feeling awful.  But, [...]

There will be a point in 6 or 8 weeks where the training schedule will start to become a drag, but for now there is the exhilaration that this sort of structure lends to the running regimen.  My [admittedly modest] goal is to be ready to do one-and-a-half hours (or 1:40 with a pub stop [...]

An early start to the day found me leaving the Banbury rail station and running down the towpath of the Oxford Canal.  The wind was furious and there was a nip in the air so when I spotted the Great Western Arms across the canal as I reached Aynho it seemed ripe time for a [...]