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.
As always I took a few photos.
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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