A good holiday day

I've been reflecting, over the past few weeks (or maybe months) how much I miss the internet of old. I'm aware that this is me properly showing my age but I really am a bit sad about what it was and what it therefore no longer is. There was definitely a golden internet age for me and that was probably 2005-2012ish. It was after Google and YouTube were launched but before social media was super widespread. A bit of Facebook, maybe, but not a lot of people were using it and all the updates had to follow an is. 'Sally is...' Most phones did not have cameras and, if they did, there was nowhere really to share the pictures anyway. Tiktok was a twinkle in Vine's eye. 

For some of that time I was hopelessly stuck into a particular forum which my life verily revolved around but, to be fair to that forum, I made some friends out of it that are still my friends over two decades later and it taught me quite a lot, about people and having a wide network of acquaintances that can advise you and how to avoid arguing with people and how to win, if you're going to. 

My main reason for internet nostalgia, though, is the blogging. I really miss reading the blogs. Those little windows into the lives of people you were never likely to meet, I loved them. Those blogging prompts I used to do, the monthly crafty scavenger hunt and the weekwords, where you'd post your link to someone else's blog to help drive traffic. I was never that interested in traffic, I'm quite happy with my 7 regular readers (I refuse to believe you are all bots); it was just nice to read what people were sharing. Now that traffic has mostly moved to social media and people don't want to write longform anymore, or maybe people don't want to read it. All those livejournals and bloggers and wordpresses. I fear for the longevity of Blogger, I really do. Perhaps I'm going to need to go back to writing my blog in html and FTPing it onto the domain, like back in the old days (when this was all fields).

Naturally, the way to resist this crumbling of what I loved is to be the change, so I'm not going to say that I'm going to blog more but, here I am. 

I had a good holiday day today. Lots of nice things coincided in one day so that I found myself eating a cottage cheese sandwich I'd made myself as I drove from one thing to another, because I hadn't actually built in any time to eat or even go to the toilet.

I started with a paddle on the Avon. We put in down by the Chequers, the place that I went to back in February when I was trying to use my kayak once per month, only to find the jetty was raised higher than the bank and it was a fair old torrent that quite evidently spelled my death if I were to have put my kayak into it. Happily it was much lower at this time of year, so much so that I had trouble getting in; I was kayaking with two people from work that I don't know terribly well, certainly not well enough to ask them to assist me into my kayak from the bank. Happily I managed to find a slightly lower bit of the jetty to get in and then hauled myself out by stepping on the bank, which was naturally not as firm as it looked but held up OK.

We saw geese, a sleepy and suspicious heron and a few kingfishers. Plus a little lad who proudly announced he was eat breakfast on a boat. 

I went from there to get my back pulled back into some semblance of normal by Jenny. My back has hurt since the start of June, when I was very enthusiastic with the hip thruster machine at the gym. I managed to get it to a point where I could stand up straight, thanks to a combo of a foam roller, a massage gun and a hockey ball, but it has been grumbling on for weeks. I don't love being this age you know, everything takes for bloody ever to heal - that hamstring I tweaked in February didn't feel normal until the end of May, for example. 

Jenny did lots of good sports massaging. I winced into the face hole. It does feel better but alas, the best thing I can do is stay active.

From there I rushed off to the swim lake at Henleaze, at the invitation of my friend Paula. This is a swim in a quarry, but it's far more exclusive than the one I usually go to - it's so exclusive that even the waiting list is closed for now. I idly consider trying to get on it from time to time but it's not close enough to home, really. That said - how gorgeous. I think I prefer the water at my usual quarry but this one definitely wins on surroundings. Grass and shrubs, little windy paths that you can wander down for a more private sunbathe, an ice cream stand, deck chairs, three heights of diving board and even a sauna. The well-heeled of Bristol know how to swim in a quarry, that's for sure. I stayed as long as I could.

Then I came home and did some work because all good things must come to an end.

No pictures. Too much fun was being had. If you want pictures, there's always Instagram.