24 May 2020 (Sunday) - 12 345


I slept like a log; night shifts do that. Over brekkie I had a look at the Internet and sent out five birthday wishes. It’s odd how there will be no birthdays in my life for a week, then five people have a birthday all at once.
I saw a friend was doing that “ten albums” thingy on Facebook that I did a few weeks ago. One of his albums was by the band Transvision Vamp; A chap I met whilst I was studying with the Open University told me he’d once slept in the same bed as the singer of that group. Admittedly he was in it the day after she was, but that was his lame to fame.
I met some really good people through the Open University all those years ago… being pre-Facebook and pre- all other social media I’ve lost touch with all of them. Such a shame.
With no emails at all I made the mistake of letting the dogs out for a tiddle. On the strength of last night’s “Chicken Shit Bingo” I had planned to make a video for a game of  Pogo Piddle Pot-Luck” but had forgotten all about it until it was too late.

We got our gear together, and spent half an hour trying to find the extending dog leads. Eventually we gave up searching and decided we could manage with their usual leads.
We made good time up the motorway, and were soon at Fawkham Green where we met Karl, Tracey and Charlotte who (by some strange co-incidence) just happened to be walking the same route that we had planned. There are those who might say we weren’t completely fulfilling the letter of the law today, but how can I control where other people choose to go for their legally-permitted exercise? We made a point of keeping the legally proscribed distance apart as we walked, and (quite frankly) if the Prime Minister is quite happy to have his chief aide openly flaunting the lock-down rules then he has effectively declared lock-down is over anyway.

Our walk followed the Fawkham Green series of geocaches and it was a (mostly) good walk. We did find ourselves coming a tad adrift as we walked across a golf course. I’m sure that two of the caches there were on parish boundaries rather than on footpaths, but speaking to some toffee-nosed twit on one of the greens it would seem that the golf club owners have tried to redirect the footpaths away from their legally proscribed courses so that they don’t have the lower orders (like me) getting in their way. But by knocking down the official footpath signs and not posting where they want us proles to walk, the golf course people have just caused chaos.

As we walked we found a surprising lot of these painted rocks that are getting ever-more popular. And we saw two very large trampolines which were just randomly set up in a field. As we walked we saw from the paper logs in the geocaches that others were out walking and geocaching today. We actually caught up with two friends and walked with them (at a distance) for half a mile or so until we found a rather good picnic spot. They carried on, and we sat down for half an hour.
Usually we like to find a pub on our walk, or end at a pub. Although it is heavy, I quite like taking a couple of beers with us; we can stop where we like and not have to worry about the normal people who might be swarming around in a pub garden.
We had a very good picnic lunch; we sat in a quiet field far away from everyone else. It was a bright sunny day; just twenty-four hours previously we’d been cowering under a tree in a thunderstorm.

Geocache-wise it was a good walk. Some of the co-ordinates were a tad iffy, but no more so than couldn’t be attributed to tree cover or power lines, and all the hides had rather good clues to help us. And we found five different geocache types today as well (which is rather impressive if you are impressed by that sort of thing).
 Toward the end of the walk I found my twelve thousand three hundred and forty-fifth geocache. Not an officially recognised milestone or achievement, but one I was happy about.
I slept most of the way home.

Within seconds of getting home "er indoors TM" found the missing extending dog leads. They were where she’d put them. Oh well… they will do for next time.
I then went out to the pond to feed the fish. Despite having a seriously bad back and despite having just walked nearly nine miles, Fudge flew up the garden like a bullet from a gun to bother the fish. He *loves* trying to get the fish food before the Koi get any.


We had a good bit of dinner, then tuned into a Facebook Live quiz run by a pal of "er indoors TM". It was all going well until the the world’s longest river was revealed. The Nile is actually the world’s longest river, but the Amazon is wider and deeper and therefore bigger by volume. The question-master hadn’t realised this subtle difference. We had, but personally when doing on-line quizzes these days I take the line that someone else has made the effort to entertain me, and therefore I accept whatever they say (even if it’s wrong). It would seem that not everyone else is as accepting as me… 

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