I woke at half past four feeling like
death warmed up. I popped to the loo, and went back to bed thinking that I
would have to cry off from today’s planned walk.
I went back to sleep and woke two hours
later feeling fine. What was that all about?
Over brekkie I had a look at Facebook. A
friend of mine was asking about why people were lighting candles in a
cathedral. Supposedly for victims of COVID-19 it begged the question of why God
wasn’t being seen to be doing very much. I’ve been asking this question since
the mid-1980s. Back then I was a Steward in the Methodist church (I was one
of four who hired and fired the vicar). After quite a few years I came to
the realisation that I didn’t believe a word of the religion. Rather than
believing, I was actually desperately hoping that it was true because the
thought of a world in which the creator of it wasn’t my best friend was rather
frightening. What finally made me see sense was that I was constantly making
excuses for a God that was (at best) utterly disinterested in the world.
I read posts from the religious to see if they have the answers I’m looking
for. So far none of them have anything other than misguided desperation to
offer, but hope springs eternal.
I then took umbrage with something that
someone had written on a “found it” log on a relatively local geocache (not
one of mine), so I posted a pointed comment on the local geocaching
Facebook page. It never fails to amaze me (in all walks of life) that
those who have very little experience of whether it is think they know better
than those who’ve been doing it for years.
I checked my emails – another two
comments had been posted to the blog from “Unknown” who is desperate for
me do “do the dirty deed” with him/her/it. I can’t find any option to
report “Unknown” to the feds for porn-mongering, which is a shame.
However I did have another fifty “found it” logs gushing praise on my
geocaches, so that was a result.
And there was another update from “Neighbourhood
Watch”. Again my area remained crime-free whilst the supposedly posher
parts of town seem to be as lawless as the wild west.
We got the dogs organised and into the
car, and Munzee-ed all the way to Shoreham where we met Karl, Tracey and
Charlotte. We sparked up out sat-navs and set off on a rather good walk around
the Shoreham area. We followed a well-marked route along the river and then
back to the car park along some rather pretty footpaths. There was one stretch
of lane which was rather busy, but I suspect that was a feature of the
loosening of lock-down.
We were rather pleased to find a little
ice-cream stall randomly along one of the footpaths. And in a sign of our times
this little stall in the back of beyond only took card payments, and offered
receipts by email. A tub of lavender ice-cream went down very well. The dogs
shared a tub of vanilla ice cream – they seemed to enjoy it. In all the
excitement of dogs eating ice creams none of the normal people saw me getting
the geocache which was not ten yards from the ice cream stall, doing the secret
rituals, and then stuffing it back in its hidey-hole.
At the end of the walk we had a look at
the pub – it was rather heaving and there were no spaces at all. But we didn’t
mind – we’d had a drink with our picnic (whilst the dogs enjoyed their rice)
when we sat overlooking one of the most beautiful views you ever did see.
There were a *lot* of people out
and about today. We smiled and greeted all the people as we went; perhaps one
in four smiled back. The others pointedly ignored us or looked down on us as
though I was the sh*t on their shoe. As we rummaged in the undergrowth we met
another set of geocachers – they too were stand-off-ish to the point of
rudeness. Such a shame – does it cause these people physical harm to be civil?
Geocache-wise this route is excellent.
Caches hidden away from the normal people, but quite quickly found by us; all
relatively big with many large enough to hold swappable thingies for the kiddies.
What I particularly liked about this route was that we’d walked it at least
twice before, The chap who’d hidden the caches (like me) thinks that
cache routes have a fixed life span, and when they are only being found about
once a month or so then it is time to replace them. That way people can have
another visit to a rather pretty part of the world. You can see how beautiful
it is from the photos I took today.
I slept all the way home.
Once home "er indoors TM"
boiled up a rather good bit of scran. She wasn’t impressed with what she’d
boiled up, but I thought it was rather good. As we scoffed it we watched an
episode of “Taskmaster”, then tuned into the Sunday evening Zoom
catch-up.
I think I caught the sun today; I’m
feeling absolutely all-in. An early night might be in order…
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