14 September 2026 (Monday) - Rostered Day Off

I slept like a log last night. The road trip to the Midlands, Nepalese curry, family party and late shift over a very busy weekend had taken its toll.

 

I made toast and (being back to the usual routine) had a look at the Internet. Someone with whom I went to college many years ago was posting climate change denial propaganda. That winds me up. Climate change is real – you can see it happening. Where there used to be cod in the English Channel there’s now dolphins and tuna. When did we last have enough snow for a sledge? When did we last have a proper summer like we had when I was a lad when every day *wasn’t* ridiculously hot?

And I found out that the world is ending in a couple of months.

One lives and learns.

And (for once) I saw the sort of thing that I have Facebook for. A friend had been to Finland to take part in the Nordic Walking World Championship. That’s what I want to see as I scoff my toast.

I Munzed, Wordled and went to wake “er indoors ^TM” and the dogs. If I have a lie-in she has an alarm set. If I don’t, she doesn’t either.

 

I took the dogs up to the woods. Sadly it is now foraging season. For the next few weeks all of the thickets within a quarter of a mile will be heaving with all sorts of people desperately seeking chestnuts and mushrooms and whatever it is that people forage for.  What none of them realise is that by this afternoon everything forage-able would have been foraged, but that won’t stop them. If any of them would walk for more than five minutes they would find an entire forest full of stuff worth having, but hardly anyone seems to forage out of sight of the car park.

If nothing else it gives the dogs something to bark at.

We had a good walk. We did our usual circuit. We didn’t see any deer, but something big was crashing about at the far end of the woods, and we chased a few squirrels.

 

We came home. I made us both a cuppa and we had one of the cakes that “er indoors ^TM” had made, and then I had a look in the garden. There was a load of soil round the bottom of one of the planters and the conifer pot. That mess wasn’t there yesterday. I had hoped the conifer pot had rusted through. I hoped in vain. A rat had chewed its way into the back of the planter. I emptied it all out and tided up. As I did so the back of the planter fell apart. I shall fix that another time.

I put shirts in to wash. I harvested dog turds. And seeing the lawn was long enough to hide the turds I ran round with the lawn mower. And whilst I was at it I hacked back more of the brambles coming over the fence from not-so-nice-next-door. As I hacked I saw she’d had a go at the brambles on her side, so that has got to be a result. Hint taken, perhaps?

 

No day off work is complete without ironing. And with ironing done I tried to quietly sneak outside, but it was “that time” and I was being watched like a pork (to coin a phrase). So I made the announcement “I’M GOING TO FEED THE FISH” and the dogs flew to the pond, with Treacle squealing in excitement.

I then carried on solving geo-puzzles and I had a message. The Dog Club squabble seems to be over for now, and the later group have asked if we’d like to hang on later this weekend as they’ve got a photographer coming. It’s a kind thought but to my mind the days of a professional photographer are numbered. Trying to get a dog to pose takes some doing, and I can’t help but think that I get every bit as good a photo off of the camera on my phone as from a fancy camera. I’m not keen on shelling out a tenner (per dog) for photos of my three which I can get buckshee.

 

By late afternoon the undercrackers were washed and dried (never a dull moment!). I put another load of washing in to scrub and “er indoors ^TM” boiled up pizza and chips then went bowling.

I settled down and watched the last episode of “Upstairs Downstairs”. What can I watch next?

 

And in closing, today marks forty-five years since I first started work in blood testing. Let’s just say that I’ve been in my current place of work for nine and a half years and they’ve been the happiest nine and a half years of my working life. Being happy in your work is important – for a *very* long time I wasn’t.

13 September 2026 (Sunday) - Late Shift

I didn’t sleep as well as I’d hoped I would. Six pints of ale and far too much Nepalese curry hadn’t been sitting too well yesterday when I then dumped five more pints and a kebab on top.

I finally got settled when “er indoors ^TM” alarm went off (for no reason) at half past seven.

 

I got up, put a load of washing in, made toast, and had a look at the Internet to see if I’d missed much. There was a rather impressive squabble on the Dog Club WhatsApp group. No matter what the subject (Star Trek fandom, keeping reptiles, fishing, pub crawls, astronomy, 70s music, cookery garden ponds, astronomy, dachshunds, geocaching, Lego…) eventually it just dissolves into quarrelling.

 

I Munzed, Wordled and hung the washing out. Ideally I would have taken the dogs out, but it was raining and there were thunderstorms forecast. So I sat on the sofa (with Bailey cuddled up to me) and solved geo-puzzles. A new lot had gone live yesterday in the general vicinity of Edenbridge. As I solved them I saw that someone had got the First to Find on all of them this morning. That someone lives just up the road. With an hour and a quarter drive (according to Google and our previous experience) having logged the first one at quarter to seven he would have left home at half past five; an hour before dawn. He logged the last one at twenty to nine having covered twenty-four caches over a four-mile route. He must have run from cache to cache. In heavy rain.

Some people love it.

I paid my road tax. Twenty quid for the year. That can’t be bad. But there is now this nonsensical thing that if I sell the car, the road tax is non-transferrable. I would have to claim a refund, and the buyer then shell out the tax again.

And then it was time for work.

 

I drove up the motorway listening to a new audiobook. This time "All Quiet on the Western Front". It's a book that (fifty years ago) English teachers did their level best to ruin for me, but is actually rather good. Sadly the audiobook is read in a very dull Canadian accent, but it's better than the pompous voice of Sir John Gielgud was in "Brideshead Revisited".

I got to work and went into the works canteen to get lunch. I quite like the hospital dinners; I usually get myself one when on at a weekend.

There was a "delightful lady" doing her best to confuse the till staff in a very poorly disguised attempt to a rather cheap meal even cheaper. I didn’t get involved…

 

I cracked on with work. Back in the day weekends at a hospital were emergencies only; these days there are clinics running and with a reduced staff weekends are far busier than they ever used to be. Back in the day we would be called in for one specific named patient, and would then wait for two or three hours to be called again. Today my workload was constant and really didn’t stop. I only got a break by walking out for five minutes.

But it was raining for much of today. I don’t mind working when it is raining.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a late dinner of chicken nuggets and chips which we scoffed whilst watching “Tipping Point”. I love TV game shows - many of the contestants have no hesitation in showing their ignorance.

Has anyone honestly never heard of Pepe Le Pew?

 

12 September 2026 (Saturday) - Family Party

My cousin’s house is right next to a church. As well as ringing the hour the chimes went off every quarter of an hour all night long. I think I heard the lot. I got up at seven o’clock, put the en-suite through its paces and went downstairs to make myself a cuppa. I eventually found the kitchen… seriously. It took some finding. Each room in the house has a floor space bigger than the entire downstairs of my house. And having found the kitchen, finding the fridge took some doing.

The was blood on the kitchen tiles. The cat had had a mouse overnight. The fourth in twenty-four hours.

You don’t get that with dogs… Rather than playing with them, Treacle just swallows mice whole

 

It wasn’t long before we were all up. My cousin Karen asked if we had time for brekkie and got out the makings of a fry-up.

We had time.

We had a very good brekkie. As we scoffed so a red kite flew over. And some seagulls. Seagulls? We must stop calling them that. We were about as far from the sea as it is possible to get in the UK, with the closest beaches being pretty much equidistant at Southend and Weston Super Mare, and still gulls were flying about.

 

With brekkie scoffed we said our goodbyes. Ideally we would have stayed longer, but in my world everything happens at once.

The sat-nav which had done so will getting up to the Midlands did just as good getting us home (once we were on the M1 it was rather straightforward). There’s no denying that I’m not keen on driving, but it was far quicker and cheaper than the train. Trains are all very well for getting from A to B very fast. However both A and B are very rarely in a convenient place to get to or from.

 

We got home. The dogs went mad about the smell of cat. We did “FEED THE FISH”, “er indoors ^TM” had made cakes. We had them with a cuppa then set off to Icklesham for a family birthday party.

We had a rather good afternoon in the sunshine. My plan had been to stay for a drink or two… we stayed for five as the littluns bossed the dogs about.

 

We came home where “er indoors ^TM” got a kebab and we played a few rounds of “Ticket To Ride”, but I was wilting.

I gave up and did that which I always threaten but rarely do. I had an early night.

11 September 2026 (Friday) - Off to Bletchley

I slept well, which was a result. I woke shortly after six o’clock to the sound of rain on the window. The sound of rain is one of the most depressing sounds there is. There are those that like rain; those that sit inside and look out at it. I wanted to go out.

I made toast and had a look at the Internet. There was endless support for lifeboats, and the right wing thugs that have been running them down have gone strangely quiet. Last night’s episode of Star Trek got mediocre reviews. For all that it was a good episode it was (very obviously) a remake of what had gone before in the genre, and those that were determined to dislike the show were very quick to point it out. And American blood bankers were discussing techniques that have been redundant in the UK for at least fifty years.

And there was a lot of talk about some local café closing and how we should all support these small businesses. Why? Yesterday I paid the thick end of eight quid for a rather mediocre cup of coffee and three bite-sized pastry things (which were on the burned side) from a local coffee shop. Why should I spend out on massively over-priced things I don’t want just because someone’s decided to make their living from selling massively over-priced things I don’t want?

 

I Munzed, and Wordled from “sound” to “aster” in five goes. Aster… it’s a sort of flower. I then took the dogs to the woods. With time short we went to Orlestone where there was only one other car in the car park (and that one left as we arrived). We walked a short walk; the first park of the wood was muddy enough and the lower part soon becomes a swamp.

As we drove I listened to more of my Brideshead Revisited MP3 audiobook… and decided to give up with it. It’s left out major plot segments and major characters. I’ll try something else.

 

We came home for a bath. You’d be amazed how much muck sticks to the belly of a small dog.

And then I said goodbye to the household, drove up to the station and collected my brother for a little road trip. Off to Bletchley.

 

We made good time up the M20, but there was quite a hold-up at the Dartford crossing. There always is.

South Mimms services was something of a game – we had a Subway lunch which was massively overpriced. Fow all that it was rather good I wouldn’t use it again simply because of the self-service machines.

From there it was a straight run to my cousin’s house. I was impressed with the sat-nav.

 

We met up with cousin Karen, her husband Martin, and had a rather good afternoon with them and the cat. Another cousin and her husband joined us for the evening. We went to a Nepalese restaurant for dinner. I’d not had Nepalese before; I’d certainly have it again.

Things got progressively more vague as the evening wore on…

10 September 2026 (Thursday) - Insomnia, Walk, Meeting, Ironing

 

I couldn’t sleep so I got up silly-early, made toast and watched an episode of “Upstairs Downstairs” in which Alex Kingston got rather lesbidaceous. I then had a little look at the Internet. It was rather depressing; the aftermath of the weekend’s hateful protests in Dover and Portsmouth were still continuing with members and supporters of the RNLI getting abuse (both verbal and in some cases physical) from the neo-Nazis. We live in strange times… there’s one part of the nation running round shouting about patriotism and tying flags to lamp posts and painting the cross of St George on roads and pavements. And there’s another part who have never been so ashamed to be British.

Meanwhile that idiot Donal Trump is offering every American five thousand dollars if they vote for his party at the upcoming elections.

I eventually felt a bit tired so I went back to bed at half past four where I didn’t really sleep. I dozed on and off until I finally got up for second breakfast at eight o’clock. As I scoffed it the bin men came for the garden waste bin. In a novel break with tradition not only did they actually empty it, they put the thing back in the general vicinity of our house.

As the dogs got up (at half past eight) so I gathered their dung, Munzed and Wordled from “nasty” to “dryly” in six moves. “Dryly” – what a stupid word.

 

I took the dogs up to Kings Wood where we had a good walk. Pogo screamed at the normal people, but that’s what he does. As we went I took a few photos and used the Map My Walk app… and my phone locked up. Twice. It’s a few years old; maybe it is time to think about getting a new one?

We came back to the car park to find several cars parked on the lane outside. Now that the RingGo parking thingy is up and running, more and more people are begrudging paying a couple of quid a week.

As we drove there and back I listened to more Brideshead Revisited MP3. I’m not impressed with it; so much of the original book has been missed out. I’m now about half-way through the three-hour audiobook. The TV adaptation was twelve hours long.

 

We came home where I sorted a cuppa. I wrote up some CPD then went round to a coffee shop in Repton where I had a meeting with the leading lights of the later session of Dog Club. There’s no denying that I was expecting the worst. I went fully expecting a fight, but we had a really productive session. There was talk of increasing the subs and changing the logistics of payments. There was talk of a working party to tidy up the paddock… 

It was all very positive. The only negative was having to pay the thick end of eight quid for a rather mediocre cup of coffee and three bite-sized pastry things (which were on the burned side). I don’t usually frequent coffee shops…

 

I came home and put a load of washing in, then did the ironing whilst watching an episode of “Upstairs Downstairs”. We did “FEED THE FISH” then I had a little kip.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a rather good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching this week’s episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”. It was rather good.

9 September 2026 (Wednesday) - Late Shift

I went to the loo in the small hours and Bailey wanted to go downstairs with me. I thought she wanted a widdle; she just wanted to play silly beggars in the dark garden. I eventually rounded her up but by the time I got back to my pit most of the bed space had been commandeered by other dogs. Conspiracy? Possibly.

I then dozed as best I could on the six inches of the edge of the bed.

 

I made toast and had a look at the Internet as I do. There was a lot of talk about the gangs of masked thugs who blockaded Dover and Portsmouth last weekend. The various fascist political parties are claiming that this was a legitimate protest against illegal immigrants in small boats… So why blockade the ferries? Why not go to the beaches (Pett Level for one) where they regularly come ashore?

And there was quite a bit of flat Earth bollox being posted. Some people really do believe that the Earth is flat.

 

I took the dogs out. Being limited for time we went to Orlestone where there was some odd bloke sitting in his car in the car park. He’s often there… you have to wonder what the attraction of sitting in the car park is.

Morgan rolled in something disgusting, Treacle and Pogo went in a swamp, Bailey went rogue in the undergrowth and at the three-quarters point Pogo ran in terror from a small spaniel.

Some of our walks are more eventful than others.

We came home. Over a cuppa I Munzed, and Wordled from “swamp” through “frisk” to “burst” on the third attempt, and then I got ready for work.

I can’t say I was keen on going to work today. The carpal tunnel nonsense was sending tingling up my left forearm. Monday’s gardening had done for my right elbow, and there was a constant ringing of tinnitus in my ears. There are those who pull a sickie if they so much as fart twice, but I’ve never been one for pulling a sickie.

 

On my way I popped into Sainsburys to get a sandwich. As I queued the chap in front of me had a phone sim card in his shopping, and was explaining to another shopper what a phone sim card was. He wasn't making a very good job of explaining it, and a passing member of Sainsbury's staff came over to explain. This chap loudly announced that a sim card was a wonderful thing which gave your phone a different number to its usual one. He went on so (rather proudly) say that he had a second sim card which he used for making prank phone calls.

 

I went into work and did my bit. The carpal tunnel thingy which was giving me grief earlier played up for pretty much all of the shift. But at tea break I played some more Meowdoku… and got to level two thousand. Perhaps I should find something more constructive on which to waste my time?

 

As I’d driven in to work so I came to the end of my Adrian Mole MP3s. I've not got the last book in MP3 format; it is on my wish list. So I started listening to "Brideshead Revisited" read by Sir John Gielgud on the way home. Ideally I would have preferred Jeremy Irons, but I got this version for free, and something for nothing is never a bad thing, or so I thought…

The audiobook I’ve got isn’t so much “abridged” as “edited highlights”; there is so much that has been left out. I’m about half an hour into the audiobook I’ve got. Knowing the story almost off by heart I think that I would actually be over an hour in if listening to a complete version.

 

8 September 2026 (Tuesday) - At Work

I had a rather bad night. Just as I finally nodded off so “er indoors ^TM” started an argument with one of the dogs (possibly Bailey).

I got up at six o’clock, made toast and watched an episode of the remake of “Upstairs Downstairs”. Being made by the BBC each of the episodes are of the same length. This morning’s episode featured (in large part) the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and struck several chords with today’s political climate.

 

I set off to work through heavy rain. As I drove there was a lot of talk about Prince Harry and precisely what he will and won’t be doing. The King has announced that Harry will be a “non-working royal”. Some commentator being interviewed this morning was talking about how his role is incredibly vague and “lots of lines are being blurred”. It would seem that he’s left America and come back to the UK where it is somewhat easier to get on the gravy train, but what do I know?

And then the sports news came on. It dragged on and on. Surely there’s only so many times anyone can say “blah blah sport”? But only a few short weeks since the football world cup, the European football thing has started. I wouldn’t mind if football wasn’t so tedious, but can anyone seriously say that after watching ten minutes of a game of football you haven’t seen all that the game has to offer?

I went to Sainsbury’s to get a sandwich and had to queue up. I like to empty the change from Dog Club into the self-service machines, but there were *loads* of schoolkids queueing up to use those cash only self-service machines. I suppose they wouldn’t have cards, would they.

 

I’d left home half an hour later than usual when on a core shift. What with the schoolkids in Sainsburys and the really busy roads I’m going to go back to leaving silly-early for work. I’d rather have a far less stressful drive and no waiting about to pay for dinner. And I quite like a bit of peace and quiet before the aggro  of the day starts.

 

I got to work and cracked on with the aggro of the day. It was rather hard work today, my carpal tunnel syndrome was playing up all day long and the tinnitus meant that there was a constant buzzing sound too.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a rather good bit of Chinese which we washed down with a bottle of plonk whilst watching more “Young Sheldon”.

Today’s been a tad dull… my arm still hurts and my ears are still ringing.

 

And it is four years since the late Queen died…