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31 July 2024 (Wednesday) - Lullingstone

I woke in a cold sweat at four o’clock following a nightmare in which our tortoise had died tragically. We haven’t got a tortoise, and have never had one. What was that all about?
Other than that I slept well, finally getting up at eight o’clock. I made toast, sparked up the Internet and sent out birthday wishes to two friends, then had a little look-see to find out if I’d missed much overnight. I hadn’t really. I had a message from someone wanting to come to Dog Club on Saturday. I replied, but… We get three or four such messages a week from people who want to come along but claim that their dog is a very special case, we’ve never seen any dog like their’s before. Maybe one in ten of these enquiries results in anyone actually turning up.
 
We got the dogs organized and set off on today’s mission. As part of the week’s Mega-Geo-Event there was a litter tidy-up and a communal picnic at Lullingstone today. We drove up to Lullingstone and fell at the first hurdle. I couldn’t pay for car parking as there was no Internet signal for the RingGo app to work. A passing friend said that you can pay RingGo from home as long as you pay it the same day. Here’s hoping.
 
The plan had been to spend an hour litter picking and doing a Geocaching Adventure Lab at the same time. But what with there being pretty much no mobile data signal in the valley we gave up after having done the two ad-lab stages at the top of the hill, and went down to the river where we tried to littler pick whilst Treacle played in the river. Bailey had a little paddle, but Morgan wasn’t having any of it.
As has been my experience with geocaching litter picks, we always go to the wrong place to gather litter. The vast bulk of our litter was lolly sticks from our Magnums and bags of our dogs’ turds.
I’ve since heard that no one made a point of getting formal permission for the litter pick… something I was told I needed to have when I was planning to hold one in Kings Wood. I suppose this would explain why our event clashed with a rather well attended children’s story telling event, and why when I arrived I had the last space in the car park.
From litter picking we moved on to the communal picnic where we met and chatted with some new friends, and I walked round giving dog treats to any dogs I met. Sadly there weren’t many. Dogs, or people really. The people we were chatting with said that bearing in mind how many people were at the Mega-Geo-Event campsite he was surprised at how few people were at the picnic. I suppose there were fifty or so there. Back in the day we used to get that many turning up to the monthly county events. I suppose that bearing in mind the campsite was an hour’s drive from where we were, people weren’t keen on driving about.
 
We came home via Wickes where I got the sleepers for the next pond project. I wanted to get some huge screws to fasten the sleepers together, but the screws that were the right size looked like they needed some sort of spanner attachment to screw them into place, and the nice man in Wickes didn’t have anything that would do the trick.
Oh well, I can bodge the sleepers together. I’ve done it before.
 
I came home to find that the litter picking and the picnic had earned me a geo-souvenir. “er indoors TM boiled up a pasta bake, then we watched another episode of the American version of “The Traitors”. Have you ever seen it? Twenty so-called celebrities work together to earn a prize pot of money. Each week they work together and make more and more dosh. However three of them are traitors. Every evening the contestants sit round and try to reason out who is a traitor and banish who they don’t trust. And then every night the traitors randomly chuck out another of the contestants. The idea being that once only a few are left, those remaining get the cash. Unless there’s traitors left in which case they get all the money.
However those being banished and chucked out aren’t getting the heave-ho through any logical process. The whole thing is a popularity contest. I watch it out of a sense of amazement that something so dire has such a cult following.
 
Amazon has just delivered my water shoes… I shall need those tomorrow (he mentioned cryptically!)

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