12 October 2026 (Monday) - This n That

I’ve come to hate night time. I can’t get comfortable. I’m forever shifting from one position in which I have constant back ache to one in which my left hand is throbbing. And add to that I’m either roasting under the covers or shivering on top of them… Last night was just like this, with what little sleep I did get plagued with nightmares about how it was up to me to finance the visitor’s centre at Adnam’s brewery.

I gave up and got up at seven o’clock, made toast and had a look at the Internet which was much the same as ever. There were a few pictures of what friends had been up to at the weekend, which was good. One chap had been to the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings, others had carried on their walk along the Thames.

One chap (on a vintage toy site I follow) was sulking that he’d been outbid on an eBay auction. He’d been bidding on a Lego wooden duck (back in the day they made more than building bricks) which eventually sold for over five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars for a wooden duck. Seriously.

 

I Munzed, and with dog breakfast done I took the dogs out. We went up to the woods and walked a bit further than we usually do. Mainly because we had to divert at the start of the walk to avoid horses. Horses in the woods boil my piss. It’s clearly laid out where they can and can’t go. When we walk along the horse-friendly tracks we very occasionally see a horse or a horse turd. When we walk along the supposed no-horses paths we often meet horses and invariably find horse turds.

And there were quite a few normal people out and about today; even though we’d started our walk early to avoid them.

We saw a stag. He was fifty yards down the path from us, and stood still long enough for me to get a half-way decent photo (which I tided up when we got home). The dogs totally missed seeing him. A little later we heard something huge crashing in the undergrowth. We often hear things, but whatever this was, it bothered Morgan. He ran to me and growled at it from the safety of my side, and he stayed by me for the next fifty yards or so.

As we walked I saw something that looked familiar. A few years ago I put out a rather large box as a geocache. It lasted a year or so before going missing so I replaced it with one of my standard pots. This morning I found the thing laying on the path. A path along which we’ve walked at least once a month for the last few years. I wonder where that had been? I brought it home. I can tidy it up and use it again.

 

We came home. I made us a cuppa, tidied up the photo of the stag, then had a pootle in the garden. I harvested dog dung, cleaned out both pond filters and hacked back more of the overgrowth coming over the fence until it got too drizzly and too cold to carry on.

I had a late Wordle. Starting with “horse” I got to “yodel” in three goes whilst “er indoors ^TM” popped off on an errand. She came back with Belgian buns, and with those scoffed I set about the ironing whilst watching more “Lost In Space” on Netflix.

Despite the rain we did “FEED THE FISH”, then I put some undercrackers in to scrub and wrote up some CPD. Dull, but it needs doing.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up pie and chips then went bowling. I tumble-dried the undercrackers (never a dull moment) as I watched more “Lost in Space”.

I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.

11 October 2026 (Sunday) - Bonnington

I had another iffy night. When I finally got to sleep so Morgan trampled over me, then with his head an inch from mine had a vigorous head-shake so his ears whipped mine very forcefully.

He does that from time to time; it really wakes you up.

I dozed on and off, and finally got up at half past seven feeling rather grim.

I put a load of washing in, and had a look at the Internet as I do. It was still there. Some friends had been walking along the Thames yesterday. Others had taken photos of last night’s auroras. It was good to see their photos; that’s what I want to see.

I Munzed, and Wordled from “along” to “uncap” in four goes.

Nice-next-door sent a message – could she straddle the fence with a ladder so’s she could muck about on her conservatory roof? I helped her set the ladder up, then left her to it.

We took the dogs down to Bonnington. We parked up at the church and once we were going the right way along the canal we followed a set of geocaching ad-labs. It was a lovely walk along the canal and back. Treacle went in. Bailey chased a heron and then rolled in something foul. We came back to the car to see an organised bunch of walkers coming down the road. They stopped at the church, and as were having lunch as we drove past. It was probably The Ramblers. I sometimes think about joining them. But I follow the local group on Facebook and their average walks are about twelve miles. Perhaps a tad too long?

 

We came home where “er indoors ^TM” warmed up the leftover Chinese (from last night), and with the oven on she roasted some chestnuts she’d gathered when we were up at Kings Wood the other day. We knew when dinner was ready as the chestnuts started exploding.

With lunch scoffed I cracked on in the garden. There was a definite sense of “work”; Nice-next-door’s boyfriend was up on our bathroom roof painting the back of their house. The roofer was cracking on with the roofing. I was impressed that he was out on a Sunday, but we’ve agreed a flat payment rather than an hourly rate so I suppose it’s to his advantage to get on with it. And perhaps (like I used to when I was full time) perhaps he has a day off in the week. Or perhaps he doesn’t have a day off. Many don’t.

I pulled rubbish out of the gravel, mowed the lawn, and had a little tidy-up of the tat down the side of the shed. I thought about cleaning the pond filters, but that will keep until tomorrow.

I came in and sat on the sofa… and woke up a couple of hours later.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up fajitas (oh yus!!) which we scoffed whilst watching another episode of “Lego Masters”. Her with the chest finally managed to get it under control.

 

I woke feeling rather grim; I’ve felt rough all day. Perhaps I’ll sleep it off?

10 October 2026 (Saturday) - Monthly Geo-Meet

I didn’t sleep very well. I got up, made toast and had a look to see what had happened overnight. That idiot President Trump had made a deal with the Russians to buy loads of Russian oil as his war in the Middle East isn’t going as well as he’d hoped. Only a few weeks ago he was threatening sanctions against anyone who was buying Russian oil. The Ukrainians have got the right arse over the deal, but are their days numbered? Remember when the Russians were accused of blowing up that oil pipeline in the Baltic? Now it would seem that the Ukrainians did it. Did they? Who knows.

A friend of mine was banging the drum of boycotting expensive large music venues and supporting small local bands. An admirable sentiment *if* you can find a small local band that isn’t totally dreadful. Most are.

There wasn’t much else happening on social media.

 

Steve wasn’t on the radio this morning; he was having a little holiday. Quite often his stand-in isn’t the same. Today there was no stand in. There wasn’t even music playing. There was just silence on the radio, the Alexa and via the Internet.

So I listened to Radio Four instead who were interviewing some civil servant about some promise that a politician had made (the details of the promise are irrelevant). The civil servant spoke volumes when he said “I do wish politicians wouldn’t say that sort of thing, it just raises expectations that simply can’t be delivered”.

That speaks volumes about our political system, doesn’t it?

And there was some supporter of Liverpool FC on the radio who was whinging about some financial irregularity of the Manchester City football team. It struck me that he wasn’t whinging out of any sense of fair play or legal rightness. Like all football fans he had *his* team and all others were just wrong and evil for the simple reason that they weren’t his team.

 

I Munzed, capping a Widdlz workshop (as you do), and Wordled. This morning I started with “radio” which gave me absolutely nothing so I started again. Eventually. Can you think of a word that doesn’t have any of the letters of “radio” in it? Eventually I hit on “blush”. From there I went to “bugle” (as I used to play one) and I got it on the fourth attempt with “bumpy”.

 

We drove round to Repton and Dog Club. There’s been a lot of petty bickering behind the scenes about Dog Club. Basically two of the people at the later group have had a squabble and one has gone running off to the people who own the paddock full of petty tales. Quite frankly I’m sick of hearing about their issues. But we had a rather good session even if Morgan did disgrace himself (as he does).

 

From Dog Club we drove out to Badlesmeere where we met Karl and Tracey. They’d had a “sort it out” email from geocaching HQ qbout one of their geocaches which had had a spate of “did not find” logs. We walked out and found the thing was exactly where it was supposed to be.

But we had a good walk. As we walked Treacle disappeared into a thicket. She eventually returned, and when she did she had a freshly killed pheasant in her mouth. Am I wrong in being rather proud that my old lady is still a dangerous wolf?

 

From Badlesmere we drove up to Oare where the monthly geo-meet was taking place. We got there early and had quite the feat before everyone else arrived. Some very good snacks, some rather decent pints of Late Red, and the chance to catch up with old friends and to meet new friends.

I slept for much of the way home, as I so often do after these monthly geo-meets.

 

We came home. Whilst we were out I took some photos. I do that. I AI-ed some of them. We got take-out from the Chinese down the road and spent the evening on the Infinity Table…

A rather good day.

9 October 2026 (Friday) - Staple

I had a restless night. I had my usual peer in to Facebook as I scoffed brekkie. Over the last few days I’m getting a lot of cartoons lambasting bad management techniques. This morning I saw one whinging about how some companies want to contact their employees at any time (day or night). It made me think… that’s how I’ve operated for the last forty years. That’s how hospitals work. What are you supposed to do if half-way through Saturday, the Sunday early shift gets mowed down by a bus?

I didn’t comment though. Life is too short.

And the Prime Minister had posted about how he was going to recognise health care workers after he’d seen first-hand how they looked after his father. I wonder what he means by “recognise”; I hope it’s not that insulting standing on the doorstep and clapping bollox we had during lockdown. I really did take some of that clapping and tried to use it to pay for my shopping. Would you believe that Sainsbury’s didn’t accept a clap as a payment? If the Prime Minister wants to “recognise” me he can do so with a hefty pay rise. I've been in healthcare for forty-five years. It took me six years to get professional qualifications, one mistake would see me out on my ear (and did), and someone I know earns more than I do by driving a fork-lift truck round. My boss's boss's boss earns less than a train driver... This isn't news

And there was a photo featuring a horse from a TV show from fifty-odd years ago. Was it “Black Beauty” or “Follyfoot”? Oh, the arguments that were going on…

 

I Munzed and Wordled. Starting with “royal” wasn’t a bad move, but “arose” took me no further. “Baron” was a step in the right direction, and I got it with “major” on the fourth go. We then cracked on with the business of the day. This weekend is international EarthCache Day(s), and again my closest unfound EarthCache was in Staple.

Pausing only briefly to pump up the tyres of the “er indoors ^TM”-mobile we were soon on our way. We got to the church, answered a few questions about the building, then went on a little walk. As always our route was laid out by geocaches. We found the first two, but the third gave us grief. To find it we had to solve a puzzle, but there was no checker. We came to somewhere which looked like the sort of place where you might stuff a film pot under a rock, but the hint mentioned a three trunked tree. The only three trunked tree we could see was fifty yards off of where we thought we were supposed to be. We gave up after ten minutes which was probably for the best. (I later established that we were in the wrong place; the right place being three quarter of a mile from where we were, and about a hundred yards from where we walked past later).

We went back to the car.. but via a circular(ish) route which took us past the Black Pig. The dogs could do with a drink, so we popped in for a bowl of water, a pint, some pork scratchings and a plate of cheesy chips, Very nice.

And the car was only half a mile down the road.

 

We came home to find the new Viz had arrived. I shall read that over the course of several “downloads” over the next couple of weeks. We did “FEED THE FISH”, we had a cuppa, and I had a message. I had an email with my shifts up until February. I made a note of them, and immediately started trying to swap some.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a very good bit of dinner. As we scoffed we watched more “Lego Masters” in which one half of the Canadian team really needs to put her chest away, and then we watched this evening’s episode of “The Traitors”. Some people are rather disparaging about the show; the trouble with it is that to play it properly you have to be quite clever. And most of the contestants are rather thick, but not thick enough to realise that to play it properly you have to be quite clever and so anyone who isn’t a doombrain gets the heave-ho fairly early on. 

8 October 2026 (Thursday) - Scaffolding's Up

My piss boiled as I peered into the Internet this morning. The leader of the Conservatives had the gall to be finding fault with the state of the nation. She talked a good fight and completely overlooked that the country’s woefully undersized army and police force, complete lack of space in the prisons, the rise of five million on the NHS waiting list and increasing the national debt from seventy per cent of GDP (which it was in 2010) to pretty much one hundred per cent (which it was when her lot were comprehensively thrown out at the last election) was all down to the previous government. And then she had the gall to say what a success privatising all the nation’s infrastructure had been. And if anyone thinks it was a success, maybe they could explain the endless drought orders and why we can pump gas across the country but not water. I’m not saying the current lot are perfect, but the Conservatives have had their chance and been found wanting.

I also saw that you can now find the price of petrol in various filling stations from the Google app, and can you believe it is six years since Argos last printed a physical catalogue?

And I had a message from the NHS app telling me what they’d told me in a letter yesterday.

I Munzed – our Munzee Guild had reached the first of our monthly targets. I Wordled from “guild” (which gave me nothing at all) and I eventually got it on the last attempt with “strew”.

 

There was a knock on the door – the roofer was putting the scaffolding up. That woke the dogs. We left them putting scaffolding up and set off to Kings Wood. It was a shame that Morgan had to be an idiot around one of the dogs we saw. Mostly he is fine, but sometimes he is just stupid.

As we walked we found ourselves behind a couple of women walking along chatting. I say “chatting”; “bellowing at each other” might be a better description. I could hear them from two hundred yards away. But they eventually went off in another direction and left us to enjoy the peace and quiet. We saw a deer as we went, but (as they so often are) it was too quick for me to get the camera focussed in.

We met one of the normal people who had a rather posh camera and proudly announced that he was photographing mushrooms.

We had a (mostly) good walk. A shame the same couldn’t be said about the drive there and back. I hadn’t realised that today was “drive like a dildo” day. As we drove out of the end of our road so I slammed on the brakes to avoid a mobility scooter the driver of which had randomly decided to veer in front of our car with no warning whatsoever.  And on the way home I had to do another emergency stop to avoid a taxi who just stopped dead for absolutely no reason. Add to that the arrogance in the traffic in the filtering by the new McDonalds…

 

We came home via Sainsburys where we got Belgian buns for lunch, and I had a stroke of absolute genius. I’ve got a geocaching adventure lab credit and no idea what to do with it. Saturday is the monthly county geocaching meting – I could put out an ad-lab at the pub based on previous monthly meets. So I set about downloading the web pages of the previous one hundred and eighty-two meets. Doing so wasn’t as easy as it might sound. It took over an hour to get what I wanted, and when I finally had it I had a problem. The idea of an ad-lab is a bit of a quiz… and I had no idea what questions I might ask.

So I took a deep breath and (would you believe it) had another stroke of absolute genius. I just devised a generic geocaching quiz with a few silly pictures and jokes. Hopefully it will make the punters smile.

 

We did “FEED THE FISH”, or that is me, Treacle and Bailey did. For all that Morgan is the greediest dog, he’s not at all interested in the dried rice that the fish have.

 

“er indoors ^TM” had been house-sitting recently. She took the keys back and then we settled down to watch “Celebrity Traitors”, and met with disaster. The scaffolding was blocking the satellite signal.

I-player to the rescue…

7 October 2026 (Wednesday) - Rainy Day

 I slept through till eight o’clock this morning. I got up, made toast and had my usual rummage round the Internet as I do. It was still there with its usual brand of nonsense. Someone on a local Facebook page was asking for recommendations for good psychics and mediums… I found myself thinking back to the days when I used to (try to) sell paintings at psychic fairs in South Willesborough. Several of the so-called psychics would get their friends to come along and form a queue to give the impression that they were good at psychic-ing. These people queuing would loudly big-up the ones they were queuing for and would be loudly disparaging about the others. There was some weirdo at those psychic fairs who would wave an eagle’s wing at ill people (presumably in competition with the NHS), and there was some other chap who would use flash photography to take photos of people sitting in front of an iridescent background, and would then (for twenty quid!) explain what the pictures he took meant. The whole thing was one big scam, but the punters loved it – they must have; they kept handing over their money.

I thought better about commented on Facebook though.

The minor hiccup on the Dog Club’s WhatsApp group seems to have resolved itself. There’s a new caretaker at the Repton centre who’s got into conversation with someone who doesn’t actually come to Dog Club who apparently told him that we’d volunteer to do all sorts of groundwork and maintenance for them. Whilst I’m happy to help where I can, it’s up to the people at the Repton centre to organise stuff, not us. And if their committee isn’t as active as the new caretaker would like (which I suspect might be the case) then he needs to sort them out, not try to sideline them. I’m taking the line that I estimate the Dog Club already pays over a hundred quid a month to use the field; what more do they want? I think I’ve turned people to my point of view.

I’ve got no reply from Tredington about the ichthyosaur fossil EarthCache. How long do I give a vicar to reply to an email about a dinosaur?

I Munzed, Wordled from “vicar” to “prove” in four goes. Having the “v” on the first go was a result.

 

We took the dogs out. With rain forecast we went to Orlestone for a shorter walk. We got there, barked at the other dog in the car park, then had a rather good walk round the woods. No one rolled in anything, no one waded in any swamps, it was a good walk.

We came home via the co-op where we got pastries for lunch.

I then went into the garden. I got the long-handled lopper out and thought I’d see if I could get to some of the higher branches of the stuff coming over the fence from not-so-nice-next-door. I managed to lop off quite a bit. The bushes now look like I’ve been pruning way over the boundary line because now I’ve removed all the weight on our side they are somewhat unbalanced. When I got to the point that the garden waste bin was full I thought it was time to stop. My plan was to fill that bin as it (hopefully) gets emptied tomorrow. And the rain had started anyway.

 

I came in and realised that the washing which was supposed to scrub whilst I did gardening hadn’t finished scrubbing. Because it hadn’t started scrubbing; I’d forgotten to put it on. Ho hum…

I put that on to scrub, and had a look at the fish tank filter. It is supposed to aerate as well as filter, but no bubbles were blowing out. I fiddled about with the filter – there’s bubbles now.

I cracked on with the ironing whilst watching an episode of “Lost in Space” when I got a message. Nice-next-door is having her roof fixed as there were serious issues around her chimney. The roofer had seen something that looked iffy on our roof over the weekend, and we’d sent a few messages (and photos and videos of the roof) to and fro, and this afternoon he sent me a quote for him to deal with the problem. Oh well… what is money for if not to squander on fixing the roof before it is too late.

I’m a great believer in getting in a professional to sort things about the house. Having tried to bodge repairs myself in the past I then paid cheap and got what I paid for. I’ve learned that it is better to shell out on someone who knows what they are doing.

In the first instance this chap knows where to get scaffolding from, and that’s more than I do.

 

Despite the rain we did “FEED THE FISH” …. Well, me and Treacle did. The smaller two dogs weren’t going out in the rain. They ain’t daft.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up fish and chips which we scoffed whilst watching this week’s episode of “Bake Off”. It was rather good.

6 October 2026 (Tuesday) - Charing

I’ve had a really good weekend away, but you can’t beat your own bed. I slept through till half hast eight this morning. I slipped straight back into old habits and did my usual thing of making peanut butter with marmalade on toast (and a cup of coffee) and had my usual look at the internet. Nothing had changed whilst I was away. Yet again religious nutjobs were offering absolutely anything they didn’t understand as conclusive proof of their particular brand of superstition. Yet again people were quarrelling about Lego, fish tanks, dogs, garden ponds, bands from the seventies…

I Munzed, Wordled from “habit” to “dimly” in five goes… and then the dogs came down. Dog tiddling is much easier when I can just open the back door and let them see to themselves rather than having to lead them up and take them to a park up the road.

And then I had a flashback. Gold Radio was playing “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and I remembered my old mucker Dougal back from the seventies who really was a dedicated follower of fashion. He always had to have the right clothes and the right haircut, and would run and hide if he thought anyone he knew would see him looking anything less than his utter best.

 

I sent an email to the vicar of the church in Tredington. On Sunday we saw an ichthyosaur in the porch of the church there. That would make a good subject for an EarthCache but having wasted a *lot* of time on this sort of thing at Camber Castle in the past, I thought I’d try to get permission before I did anything else. If I’m going to fall at the first hurdle I’d rather not waste too much effort.

 

We took the dogs out. We each only needed one more Treasure to complete the latest set of Geocaching Treasures, and the closest place to do that was the geocache at the church at Charing Heath, so off we went. Finding it involved going round the church to find different bits of information. This would give us numbers with which we would do some sums and get the co-ordinated of where we needed to rummage to find the cache.

We went round the church getting all the numbers. Then we tried again until we both had numbers which agreed. I did the sums and got a location about a mile or so away which seemed to be randomly in the middle of some obscure field. So we scratched our heads, agreed there could be some ambiguity in one of the numbers and came up with a location which was only a short walk away.

We walked that short walk and came to a telegraph post. Geocaches are often at the bottom of telegraph posts, but we spent about twenty minutes rummaging round before finally giving up, sulking and getting on with our day.

 

We then went up to Longbeech Woods to walk the dogs. Again we found an empty car park. Very few people go to Longbeech Woods. We had a good walk, but a short one. “er indoors ^TM” had a new set of boots to break in. It was a shame that Treacle rolled in muck, but usually one of them rolls in something.

As we walked I thought about the geocache we didn’t find, and I had a stroke of absolute genius. Why didn’t I re-check my calculations? It was at this point that I realized that the number over which we felt there might be some ambiguity actually appeared more than once in the formula.

Whoops…

I did the sums again and with our walk walked we went back… I say “back”, “we tried another location that wasn’t at the base of a telegraph pole” would be a more precise description. Would you believe it – the geocache was there. It was a rather cute model church.

 

We came home via the co-op where we got celebratory Belgian buns. And once we’d scoffed them I cracked on in the garden. The lawn needed mowing and the pond filters needed de-gunging. I then got the ladder out and trimmed back some of the trees overhanging from not-so-nice-next-door. Back in the day before the husband completely vanished I once asked them how far across out garden they thought it was acceptable for their trees and roses to hang. He seriously felt there was nothing wrong with them reaching half- way across our garden, and told me (several times) that one day I would be grateful for that.

Today I got their trees stuff cut back up to level with the boundary about twelve feet up. I can’t get much higher than that. If any of my loyal readers have a hedge trimmer on an extendable pole…

And then suddenly it was half past four. Where had the day gone?

 

I Meowdoku-ed for a bit, and “er indoors ^TM” boiled up a very good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching last Friday’s “The Traitors”. It was rather good.