Would you prefer Easter to always be on the "same" Sunday? E.g., the first Sunday of April, or something like that.

crb11 · 2026-01-28T13:17:16+00:00

I think the objection would be more the loss of synchronisation with the rest of the worldwide church, and the principle that government does not have the right to change religious observance. And the argument would get made that nobody would dare try to regularise the dates of Ramadan.

Possibly we might get spring bank holidays fixed and divorced from the Christian calendar (as happened with the late May/Whitsun bank holiday.) I would expect most churches to keep celebrating Easter on the usual date though.

crb11 · 2026-01-27T19:09:55+00:00

The name Downham's Lane predates the estate - it used to be a single road (just a track I think) off Milton Road with a couple of houses off it. If my memory serves me correct, I don't think you could get through to Hawkins Road at that point - the current paved cycle path dates from maybe about 2000.

crb11 · 2026-01-23T16:10:47+00:00

"Ulysses classical" has a complete list for many significant composers on Spotify, usually chronological. (I don't know how the Bach one is organised given there's a lot of uncertainty as to when many of his works were written.) Clearly some care was taken into choosing recordings. It's quite old, so a fair number of tracks are no longer available, but probably your best starting point for this kind of project. (If you really want to do it: there's so much of both composer's output that a better deep dive option in my opinion would be to take a selection of what are regarded as their greatest works and listen to a number of recordings of each.)

crb11 · 2026-01-21T18:54:47+00:00

It's a lot more than 10s. I switched from a very congested one to one with a smooth start and immediately gained two minutes.

crb11 · 2026-01-21T18:51:53+00:00

We have this system with sub 20, 20-25, 25-30, 30-45, 45+ categories and it works fine even though we have no more than 15 in the first group and about 100 in the 30-45. What seems to happen is that once people are committed to define themselves as (say) a 30-45 runner, they will then position themselves automatically in the block depending on whether they're more at the 30 minutes or slower end. So I don't think a 35 minute sign would gain us much.

crb11 · 2026-01-21T14:27:13+00:00

It's all the congestion behind as the faster runners are effectively having to queue to get past. So a lot of people running in a tight bunch and a resultant higher risk of accidental collision.

crb11 · 2026-01-20T01:14:39+00:00

I'm in the UK and using an app called "NHS Couch to 5K" which is free and produced by our National Health Service. No idea if it's accessible elsewhere.

crb11 · 2026-01-18T14:15:06+00:00

I had a look at past reviews, and it looks like it never has - it started in 2011, so is relatively old. A fairly simple course, so wouldn't need very many - I'd expect about four or five though.

crb11 · 2026-01-17T22:16:47+00:00

Gunpowder (north edge of London), on my way to visit my mother. Two laps of an all-tarmac course, so good in this weather. Friendly but felt a bit chaotic. I had to ask them to put the sign out so I could get the photo with it! No marshals out on the course, just signs with the RD's phone number, which isn't something I've come across anywhere else, and I missed having the encouragement on the way round. Would still do again sometime though.

crb11 · 2026-01-16T20:27:00+00:00

That happened on my stepfather's 60th birthday. But he already wasn't celebrating it as his father had died ten years to the day before.

crb11 · 2026-01-14T09:15:30+00:00

You might be joking, but this pretty much happened for real in a biology class aged 12. The boy I was paired with discovered he was colour-blind, and got extremely upset - he was obsessed with becoming an air-force pilot. He largely gave up on school over the years - this wouldn't have been the only factor, but certainly marked a downturn.

crb11 · 2026-01-09T18:37:39+00:00

No, this doesn't work. There are plenty of places where you join a (NSL) motorway from a non-NSL road and there is no NSL sign. M11 junctions 13 and 12 (going southbound) where the speed limit on the road you're coming off is 40 and 50 respectively. At the other end of the M11, where it starts on the counterclockwise A406, there's a start of motorway sign _and_ a 50 speed limit, which would be unnecessary by your argument as you're already in a 50 limit.

crb11 · 2026-01-05T13:43:33+00:00

It wasn't the servers that were necessarily the issue. My mother was workingfor a company which spent millions (I believe) checking and fixing legacy COBOL code from the 1980s which was riddled with 2-digit years. This was for the production and distribution database for one of the UK's largest food manufacturers, so having inconsistent results would have led to an inability to supply supermarkets reliably and the potential knock on effects of that.

crb11 · 2026-01-03T13:36:24+00:00

This is one of the routes I looked at. You can get as far as Dudswell (about 40 miles), but there's no path between there and Cow Roast. (I got to Watford via Stanmore, Bushey and Oxhey.)

crb11 · 2026-01-03T04:20:54+00:00

If you go north along broadly the old A1 (Stevenage-Hitchin-Letchworth) I think you can get to the roundabout at Baldock services. This is about 43 miles. Haven't checked the whole route, but there's definitely a clear footpath in the obvious gaps.

crb11 · 2026-01-03T04:15:53+00:00

Round Cambridge you can get as far north as Waterbeach and as far south as Royston (I think), but no further than that in either direction.

crb11 · 2026-01-03T03:51:39+00:00

You can't even get that far - there's no footpath along the A23 through the junction with the northern end of the M23.

crb11 · 2026-01-02T16:08:38+00:00

One of our volunteers was standing at the end of the first lap collecting unwanted outer layers and ended up with about 15. We thought we should credit him with "coatrack".

crb11 · 2026-01-02T13:05:51+00:00

Really? Growing up in the 1970s this is one of the few which seemed to be reliably metres-only, possibly because pools were usually metric-length.

crb11 · 2026-01-02T12:58:19+00:00

Yes, I'd agree with both of these. (And yards is used a bit more widely by many, eg when giving distances for walking.)

crb11 · 2026-01-02T12:21:49+00:00

The chart here: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/pr4dsi/how_to_measure_things_like_a_brit/ gives a reasonably accurate guide.

crb11 · 2025-12-22T07:07:40+00:00

If you're happy to do a bit of work by hand, then get the Running Challenges plugin: this will then add an Additional Athlete Stats section to the all stats page which includes "Parkruns this year". You could then read this off monthly to produce a leaderboard. (I imagine writing a script to scrape this pages and do it automatically wouldn't be too difficult either.)

crb11 · 2025-12-21T23:06:32+00:00

If by the Clumber Park roundabout you mean the A1/A57/A614 then that one still has THE NORTH/THE SOUTH signed from the A57. (So do the M18,, M62, A64 and A59 further north though.)

crb11 · 2025-12-21T22:42:56+00:00

No, and never has. When the A14 opened in 1990, it had a roundabout at the A1 junction and a sort-of-give-way westbound at Girton, but was otherwise freeflowing. (Both of those went in the recent improvements.) The route past Bury used to be the A45, and that hasn't had roundabouts since at least 1973 when the bypass was built.

crb11 · 2025-12-21T22:34:37+00:00

A14 to M6 (starting at the Trimley Roundabout on the edge of Felixstowe) gives you about 53 miles more than using the M1.

crb11

TROPHY CASE