The New Year is upon us and 2024 is there for the shaping. A great thought from one of my X (formerly known as Twitter) contacts who has posted this :

pic.twitter.com/hpX6OLQNNj

— Brendan O'Sullivan 🇮🇪🇪🇺 (@ImtaBrendan) January 1, 2024

So looking for the potential for wellbeing in my community I have put my best foot forward already for the New Year. The betwixt Christmas and New Year is usually where I have all those good and worthy thoughts that usually results in a list that is very aspirational but is that at the end of day. In other words the new year resolutions that the alternate me would do if I did not work as a teacher and also be a fulltime carer. Well, we have the full time carer bit under control by automating a lot of the tasks for my 81 year old father by turning the house into an Alexa enabled smart home. This has subsequently led onto even incorporating a robot I have named Jeeves to the mundane bit of vacuuming when I am out at work.

Work being in the town of the horse Newmarket, UK. I am always amused when teaching in the area and asked by pupils, “Where are you from, Sir?” and I say “Here!”. This puzzles them a little as they do not understand that it was possible to be born in Newmarket at one point. The local hospital was also the maternity hospital. 

So, having been born in the county of West Suffolk which ceased to exist in 1974 I now blog and concentrate on the Greater Cambridge Area which stretches around Cambridge in the UK towards Newmarket, Ely, Cambourne and my hometown Haverhill. The Greater Cambridge area is also a descriptor used to describe that area influenced by Cambridge, Ma, USA. My home town also has a namesake in the USA, Haverhill, Massachusetts. A former son of Haverhill was responsible for the drafting of the original Massachusetts constitution, which influence the later US Constitution. I have no reservation in promoting my hometown as one of the influencers of the present form of the USA. I say present as there are events happening there that would appear to go to the heart of what makes a democracy. If people from the USA want to visit the area of West Suffolk for work or tourism Haverhill has a few amenities to offer and is a more affordable base than Cambridge itself. Work wise we have thousands of US service men who visit the area of West Suffolk at RAF Lakenheath and Mildenhall. Former bases also exist within half an hour drive, and of course we have the Cambridge American Cemetery at Madingley. Newmarket has extensive business and cultural links to the home of racing int the USA Lexington, Kentucky, again with a link to Massachusetts named after the town of the same name. I might as well also mention that other not so minor link of Harvard being located in Cambridge, Ma founded by graduates of Cambridge University.

Wellbeing is in the title of this blogpost so we will move onto how it may be possible to that in the Greater Cambridge and West Suffolk area. Having spent some of betwixt time looking at my own wellbeing and having a desire to be a bit more active outside my job I have had a look at some apps that promote physical activity. One of them is the Discover Suffolk app. Intrigued by what I could do with the App I embarked on the 30th December 2023 to explore it’s features. I downloaded the app onto my Android Samsung phone. Looking through the website I discover it has been set up by Suffolk County Council to promote Walking, Cycling and Riding (that horse link again). Suffolk County Council is very Ipswich centric and Haverhill is at the far western extreme of the county at the geographical tripoint shared between Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex. West of Bury St Edmunds there are few listed walks. So what do we do about that? We made our own route.

One of the features is the ability to track your own walk, add photographs and eventually publish your route. The data that you share with the app and the loss of control over your own photographs uploaded to the App is part of the experience you have to buy into if you want to publish and contribute to this citizen curated resource. I took the opportunity on this walk to also do a little citizen science by contributing to the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s New Plant Hunt (more on this in another blog post). The app was very easy to use with a start pause function on the tracking part of the app. I added photographs as I walked one of them is now part of the media I have stored on the app showing what is like to walk over the former railway viaduct shown above. I will read the terms and conditions of use a little closer as I am a little confused as to who has the rights of the media shared. However, this might be a small price to pay for the promotion of a walking route from the Bumpstead Road to East Town Park via the Sturmer Arches. The GPS based map function of the app can also be used as alternative to an Ordnance Survey Map. The location you find yourself at can be clicked on in similar to Google Maps (in fact the way it works suggests it an application of Google Maps something I need to check) and geographical information appears within the app. This gives you the address at which you are at, the coordinates of your location in decimal degrees format as well as degrees/minutes/seconds and interestingly the what3words locator phrase. A profile of the topological journey is also given showing the height above sea level profile of the walk as well as the amount of time spent walking uphill, downhill and on the flat. The total distance and time for the walk was also recorded as well as the route appearing on the map in real time.  Meeting up with friends with whom I had previously organised social rambles many years ago I was very happy to share the app. The provision to set up a group might mean we resurrect the pub rambling group for 2024.

To see the route Click https://www.outdooractive.com/en/track/tracking-on-31-dec-2023-09-23-53/284907059/?utm_source=unknown&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=user-shared-social-content