This month, Leeds Autism Practice ran our first public in-person event, Understanding Late Diagnosis in Autism & ADHD. The event sold out in advance and the feedback was very positive. We’re running at least three more events in June and I hope they will be equally well received.
When I did Leeds Marathon earlier this month, I decided to treat myself to the VIP experience on the basis that A) it would be a nice welcome home present to myself and B) me eating small finger sandwiches would contribute to valuable research on supporting motor neurone disease.
It was in the Howard Suite which gives you a view of both the rugby field and the cricket ground.
Most of the appeal of all was better availability of toilets. This is a real source of stress for me and has had a big impact on my running so if I can throw some money at it and make the problem go away, that is money well spent. They also provide food before and after the race and somewhere to sit down, although the seating was pretty limited.
I did manage to squeeze in a pastry before the race. There wasn’t much of a lunch buffet after, but they did have some sandwiches and I had a few of those. They had a separate room for baggage with plenty of space, although you could just wander in and out of there so it was less secure than a standard bag drop.
The most challenging part, though, is that with it being in the Howard Suite, these were the stairs we had to navigate. Not ideal after just having run a marathon :D.
Back in the day, Leeds had a marathon. Then, in 2003, just before I became an adult, they stopped having one. And for twenty years there was no city marathon. In 2022, I went travelling. And Leeds announced they were launching a new city marathon. Finally, in 2026, my schedule and the Leeds Marthon schedule lined up. I feel like Baddiel and Skinner should write a song about this.
I’ve had a tough time with marathon running recently, most recently running Dublin Marathon on my birthday. This time, I felt quite anxious for the first four kilometres or so. Maybe it was that feelings of “this is going to be hours of suffering ahead”. After this, though, it mostly went away. I had some light headedness about 16 kilometres in, but otherwise felt good.
I also moved well. My last few marathons have all been around 4:30 mark, so I was expecting to be slower than this with the big hill coming back from Otley. But it just never materialised. I kept ticking kilometres off at just over six minutes. I think I had mentally prepared myself for it to be super hilly, and so once I was up onto the ridge line, and even coming back from Otley, it just never felt that bad. I ran almost the whole way up to Bramhope with only a short walking stint to eat.
At about 34k, the marathon and half marathon routes merge. This meant those of us running a marathon at six minutes a kilometre, and those running a half at what I would guess would be 12ish minutes, were jammed together on the same road. It was hard to find space, and I felt sorry for the half runners who suddenly found themselves swarmed by marathon runners. It was crowded the whole way down Otley Road and into the stadium. Lovely finish line, though.
My time was:
4:02:50
Elina and Venla came to meet me after the race. It was tricky finding each other as both o2 and Vodafone’s networks were down around the stadium.
The support was excellent. I’ve never done London but I’ve done Dublin twice and I would say in Dublin, there are people watching more than there are not people. Leeds wasn’t quite Dublin good but much stronger than any other race I’ve done. I think that says quite a lot given it is not a city marathon: Dublin stays within the city at all times, whereas this is an out-and-back to Otley and still enjoys great support along a lot of the course.
Overall, great race. I would still say it is pretty hilly to make a PB attempt on it, and you risk getting trapped behind half marathon runners. But as a nice day out with great support, it’s a lovely race to do.
After almost a decade away, I’ve returned to Toastmasters. Back in the day, we had much of paper manuals and lots of talk about the upcoming changes known as pathways. It’s all here now. I’m on the “motivational strategies” pathway, which means I’m back doing an ice breaker speech. My topic was “Why Can’t We Agree About Gaza?” and well down well.
The HS2 debate often gets framed around “do we need this?” But a much better comparison is “if we have X amount of money for trains, where should we spend it?”
Leeds, Bristol, Liverpool, Cardiff, Belfast and Cambridge all lack a light rail or tram system. This is economically damaging. I know people who have had to turn down multiple jobs because there is no reliable way to get from work to their children’s school on time. People want to work. Companies want to hire them. But lack of infrastructure is turning working people into benefit claimants. I don’t want to pay for that.
The target user of HS2, well-paid professionals, have other options (slightly slower trains, planes, cars, online meetings), whereas the lack of public transport limits people who typically work in-person jobs and have no other options for travel. I do want to live in a society where we look after the most vulnerable.
I don’t know if HS2 is a “good” use of money in isolation. But I do know it’s a poor choice compared to building more light rail.
Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences is a book by Anton Jäger. In it, he charts the political landscape, describing eras he calls politics, post-politics, anti-politics, and into the current era, hyperpolitics.
People used to be part of social movements such as political parties, trade unions, sports clubs and churches. Now everything is ephemeral: movements rise and die, such as the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter protests on the left, and the Tea Party and Proud Boys on the right. People are highly politically engaged but not part of durable movements. This mirrors the attention span of social media and market trading.
Jäger doesn’t touch on this in the book, but it should be noted that one of the reasons Black Lives Matter doesn’t have clear leaders is to stop them all getting murdered, as happened in the civil rights movement.
Attempts have been made to change things: Corbyn and Momentum in Labour, and Bernie Sanders in the US. But, on the whole, the left has been poorly adapted to this new world. The right has been damaged, too, but has still been able to push policies that are more market friendly. Momentum did not rebuild the base into a coherent political movement and Sanders isn’t even a Democrat.
Jäger argues that the deinstitutionalisation of politics was done deliberately by neoliberalism, that wanted to hollow out social institutions so the market could be protected from democracy. Political parties became an oligarchy of power-sharing by parties basically running along the central line.
What is the answer? Political parties and trade unions may be the answer. But without factories and with suburbs, these may have been a product of their time. We do not have the same communities or shared workspaces we previously had. As Mark Fisher notes, factory strikes worked in a way that university lecturer strikes do not. It might be we need a new paradigm, such as social reproductive contact points (schools, daycares, etc). But work is where conflicting needs clash, so should not be written off.
Even political parties are ephemeral these days. We have seen UKIP come and go, then the Brexit Party come and go, and at time of writing we have Reform. Elsewhere in Europe, Pirate Parties have won elections before fading away. Any solution based on this not only has to build a political party with local engagement, but also has to rebuild class consciousness.
Track sessions are back in full flow at Hyde Park Harriers, and I was back coaching last week. I also had the pleasure of leading group one on Monday, including loads of people running with the club for the first time.
Two months ago, our kitchen floor collapsed. There has been a lot of back-and-forth about it, but last week, contractors finally came in to sort it out. When they took the floor up to find out what was going on, they found there was an old rotting floor underneath it, and someone had just built a new floor over the top of it.
Stokesley Leisure Centre is a pool-based sprint triathlon based at Stokesley Leisure Centre in Yorkshire, run by Cleveland Triathlon Club. The pool was wide enough and there were only 3-4 of us in each lane with participants starting every three minutes. The bike course is absolutely beautiful: it just enters the North York Moors National Park so you get panoramic views without any hills being involved. The run is a road-based out-and-back. The only thing I was surprised at was they didn’t check bikes in and out of transition, but maybe that’s the joy of living in a town of 6,000 people. Would do this race again.
Mobile phone signal often sucks indoors. Not a single network offers reliable signal in either my home or my office. Many of us have given up, turned on WiFi calling, switched to WhatsApp, and generally concluded that phones don’t work inside buildings anymore.
One of the issues is that as phones “advance”, we use more and more data. More data requires the greater bandwidth available at higher frequency radio waves, and higher frequencies are less good at penetrating buildings. The more data we use, the worse it gets, and this problem is likely to get worse in the future.
It’s also an issue that as we build energy efficient homes and offices. These are designed to reflect heat, which also blocks radio waves, so again, it’s likely to continue getting worse.
There is a solution: in urban areas, we could replace high-powered phone masts with a higher density low-power ones, placing one on each street, or inside large buildings as the Trafford Centre has already done.
But this is expensive. And this is where it intersects with the “efficiency” of the free market.
Right now, the four big network operators – o2, Vodafone, Three, and EE – all maintain their own networks. We’re paying for this through our phone contracts and because each provider only gets a quarter of the market, they can all only afford to build a shitty network that is pretty much as good as their competitor’s network, leaving a lot of people without signal and no better competitor to switch to.
This is unfortunate because building a network to support the entire population costs pretty much the same as building a network to support a quarter: most of the cost is in installing the infrastructure and not per-user utilisation costs, so having four separate networks that do the same thing is almost entirely redundant.
Instead, if we switched to a nationalised network, as we have with the national grid, there would be almost four times as much money to invest in infrastructure and we could have a much more reliable mobile network for potentially the same cost.