8 January 2021 (Friday) - Before the Mud Melted (Africa by Toto)

I watched the last episode of “Motherland” as I scoffed a bowl of granola, then on seeing the cars outside were still icy I smiled. I could put my plan into action. As I was scraping the ice off of my car in the works car park at nine o’clock last night I had a stroke of genius. If we could get out early for our morning walk we might get to the woods before the mud melted, and so it would be firm underfoot and the dogs wouldn’t get filthy and wouldn’t need a bath when we got home.

As we drove off, the thermometer on the car’s dashboard said it was minus four degrees… that was rather bracing, We got to the car park in Orlestone woods five minutes before sunrise. There wasn’t any other cars there at all. There was the rubbish of someone’s McDonald’s, but there always is. We set off on our walk… and it was then that I realised the flaw in my genius plan. There was a crust of frozen mud over a *lot* of still-squelchy mud. Only the top surface of the mud was frozen. The frozen bit was rather thin; not thick or strong enough to take the weight of a small dog (let alone a tank like Pogo).

We walked our walk, came home and had a bath…

 

With dogs scrubbed I made some toast and had a little look at the Internet to see if I’d missed much. I saw that my request to join a Facebook group had been accepted. I’m now a member of “A Group Where We Add “Africa by Toto” To Open Polls”. If when you are voting for anything on Facebook and you see “Africa by Toto” as an option, now you know where that is coming from. I wasted no time in suggesting “Africa by Toto” as a candidate in a poll on one of the political pages I follow. So far it hasn’t accrued any votes, but hope springs eternal…

I did my COVID-19 test, wrote up a little CPD, caught a Flat Rob in the Skyland (it’s a Munzee thing), planned a slightly longer dog walk for tomorrow, and an hour after we’d come back from our walk my phone beeped with a weather warning. There might be ice about today.

Those weather warnings are on the case (!)

 

It had been cold when we'd come home from our walk; it hadn't warmed up much during the morning. As I drove to work I caught the end of some radio program about what living in Britain in the 1980s was like. As is usually the case in these kinds of shows I found myself wondering which part of Britain the program's makers were talking about, as the Britain they were describing bore no relation to the one I used to live in. Mind you the Britain of today that they often describe on the radio seems nothing like where I live either. One of us is wrong... probably me I expect. I usually am...

The comedian (?) Ruby Wax was then on for half an hour supposedly talking about the best way of dealing with stress. Great show was made of the fact that the program had first been broadcast three years ago. Perhaps it was relevant to its time; it just seemed offensive today. Perhaps I was being overly sensitive?

 

I stopped off on they way for Munzee reasons, earning myself ten Zeds (as one does), and got to work for the late shift where I ended up being rather busier than I had intended to be. But such is life, and it would be a dull old life without non-specific enzyme mediated antibodies, wouldn't it? 

It was a shame that the motorway was closed as I tried to drive home down it…

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