I woke this morning
raring to go, and checked the time. 3.20am. I then lay awake for a
couple of hours, finally dozing off just before my alarm went off. I
then spent an annoying few minutes fighting with the alarm on my
phone. Although I set it whenever I need to be up promptly, I so am
so rarely woken by the thing that when it does get to make a noise I
really struggle to be able to turn it off. I fought with it for what
seemed like an age at 6.30am this morning; probably waking half the
street whilst I was at it.
A swift bit of brekkie:
over brekkie I saw that the geocache I set up yesterday still hadn't
been found. There's a chap who lives locally who prides himself on
finding the things as soon as he can after publication: sometimes
finding them within fifteen minutes of their going live. This one
went unfound for over twelve hours until this same chap found it this
morning. He sent me a nice little email thanking me for my efforts,
and said that last night's rain put him off.
As I drove to work I
listened to the radio with a sense of amazement. Abu Hamza the
allegedly hate-mongering cleric has finally been deported to face
charges in America. I don't know what he's done, or supposed to have
done. And at this stage in time I doubt if anyone ever will get to
the truth. It's apparently taken about seven years to bring this
bloke to court, and so how can any of the witnesses at the trial have
a clear memory of what happened (or was alleged to have happened) so
long ago.
Similarly now that he's
safely dead there would seem to be a queue of people lining up to
make allegations against the late Jimmy Saville. He's alleged to have
had his wicked way with several naive young ladies over the years.
One such was interviewed on the radio this morning. Perhaps I'm the
naive one here, but what do these people hope to achieve? Maybe he
was innocent? Maybe he was actually the worst kiddy-fiddler of his
generation? Personally I neither accuse nor defend him; I simply
don't know anything about the case. But (just like Abu Hamza), from
this remove in history it's a safe bet that he won't get a fair
trial.
And the weather wound me
up too. I set of to work in the rain; I don't mind going to work in
the rain; I know I'm not missing anything. But as the day went on so
the weather brightened up. I checked the weather forecast to see what
the weather might be like on my next day off. The BBC has a frankly
amazing weather forecasting web site. When I checked it the forecast
for Monday was white cloud. But when I went into the detailed
forecast for Monday it was predicting rain of varying severity all
day long.
There was a get-together
today for anyone who goes geocaching in Kent. Lisa went along and had
asked me to go along too. It was as well that I was at work today. I
tend to stand for elected positions on things such as that, and
having seen what's happening on the Kent geocaching Facebook page I'm
not sure I want to get too involved on a formal basis. Most hobbies
have insider squabbles and internal politics. I have had too many
arguments about kite flying and snake keeping in the past. One of
the things I love about the astro club is that it doesn't have this
aspect to it.
The Kent geocaching
community seems to be currently staging a war against some bunch
operating from the north Kent coast who have been accused of all
sorts of malpractices against small plastic boxes hidden in
clandestine locations. Emails and letters are flying about between
the protagonists and the international organisers of geocaching. I
don't want to get involved with either side, even though I've even
had a minor run-in myself with this lot. They accused me of
falsifying my claim that I'd found a particular cache; their
reasoning being that if they couldn't find it then nobody could, and
so anyone who did claim to have found it was demonstrably lying.
Geocaching is a silly
enough hobby as it is. Does it really need to be squabbled about?
As is always the case the
important stuff is ignored. Caches in Folkestone have been found
contaminated with drugs, and no one in the establishment is saying
anything.
I did my bit at work, and
came home and watched "Auf Wedhersehn Pet" DVDs for
an hour or so. I would have liked to have gone to tonight's film
night with everyone else, but by the time I'd got back to Ashford it
was gone 9pm. I could have arrived in time for the second film of the
evening, but had I done so I wouldn't have got to my pit until gone
midnight, and with another early start tomorrow I thought better of
the idea. Maybe next time...
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