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20 August 2024 (Tuesday) - Cheeky FTF

I slept well. I was rather miffed to see rain when I got up though. I made toast and scoffed it whilst perusing the Internet. There was talk on one of the local Facebook pages about Elwick Place. Apparently millions of pounds have been spent on building a cinema and shops and community areas just up the road, but now most of the businesses involved have shut up shop. As always those posting opinions on social media were showing their complete ignorance of what is done by local council, county council, central government and private businesses. So many people were ranting about what they should be doing; “they” being generic unspecified individuals, officials and public bodies.
But sadly many of these people’s ignorance actually illustrated a point. Many of the issues facing Elwick Place could only be solved by a coming together of local council, county council, central government and private business. A coming together which is never going to happen.
And in the meantime much of Elwick Place is closed and will remain so.
 
And then my lap-top beeped. A new geocache in Longbeech Woods. Well, we were going there for our dog walk anyway, so that would be a bonus.
In order to find where the thing was hidden I needed to solve an on-line jigsaw puzzle. And with that solved I got the leads on to the dogs. That took some doing. For all that they clearly love their walks, they can sometimes be incredibly reluctant to get their collars and leads on.
Eventually we got going. As I stopped and started as we drove through the slow-moving traffic there was a rather interesting interview on the radio with Bill Gates. The chap is only nine years older than me, and as I listened to him I got the distinct impression that he’d not done anything that countless others haven’t done, but he was just very lucky.
He was talking about his charitable foundation and how he’s spending a fortune on delivering vaccinations to poor children in Africa. I wish I could remember his exact words, but he made some comment in which he said that it came as a surprise that market forces only benefit a vanishingly small proportion of humanity.
 
We got to the woods. We parked up in an empty car park. We could have parked closer to the geocache but bearing in mind how long we’d taken to get there I’d all but given up on being first to find. We walked down the lane to the location of our prize, and I was amazed to see no one had parked in the single parking space I might have used. I let the dogs of the leads and we walked into the woods all the time expecting to see familiar faces walking back with a smug air. But we saw no one, we got to where we were supposed to be, and after a very short search I had the cache in hand. And we were first.
At this point I looked at my watch. It had only been three quarters of an hour between getting the notification and finding the thing. It seemed a lot longer.
We then carried on with our walk. We explored the tracks and footpaths. We met a nice lady with three dogs and played chase (and shared treats). We found a Letterbox Hybrid. Pogo rolled in fox poo.
 
We came home where Pogo had a bath. And with Pogo scrubbed I popped up the road to the corner shop to get pastries. I scoffed mine whilst doing the geo-admin, then wrote up some CPD. I do that. And I ordered up cash for next month’s holiday. Where we’re going they want American dollars… which is odd.
And I ordered a money belt in which to stash the money.
 
I went into the garden where I topped up the water in the little pond, pulled out the blanket weed… and poggered my back. So I spent the afternoon having a rest whilst watching episodes of “Four in a Bed” in which a rather grim little B&B in Blackpool beat some rather good places where you would go for a country break. Why did this grotty place win? For the simple reason that it is far easier to underpay someone charging two hundred quid a night than it is someone charging forty.
 
“er indoors TM boiled up lamb chops which we washed down with a decent bottle of plonk whilst watching more episodes of “Below Decks”. Those of the crew that weren’t busy porking each other had the hump with a colleague who would be best described as a rather obnoxious bone idle shirker. Personally I’m of the opinion that every place of work needs one rather obnoxious bone idle shirker. It gives everyone else someone to hate and stops them squabbling amongst themselves.
 
And I’ve had yet another dubious friend request on Facebook.

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