7 August 2016 (Sunday) - Badger's Hill


Despite a rather busy day and a late night yesterday I woke shortly after 6am this morning. I would have liked to have slept longer but despite the best efforts of my CPAP machine I couldn’t breathe. So after laying awake and getting more and more wound up I got up.

"Furry Face TM" was also up and about. That surprised me. Bearing in mind how hot it was yesterday and how the park fills with joggers on a Sunday morning we went for our walk rather earlier than usual.

Perhaps it’s a dog-owning thing; there were loads of dogs being walked round the park this morning. Fudge got up to all sorts of mischief.



We came home for brekkie. As I scoffed I had a look-see on-line. On Friday I had a little rant about how I was sulking because no one had thought to offer me a lift to Wales. Perhaps I had a point, perhaps I was being rather (utterly) unreasonable, perhaps lack of sleep had done strange things to my brain. However some chap had clearly read my rant and made reference to it on the Geocaching in Kent Facebook group and made mention of me by name. Apparently he too felt miffed; he felt he was not part of “the clique”, and several other people commented that they too were feeling equally not part of the “select few”. I was frankly amazed by what I read on the Internet this morning. One chap who posted saying that he too felt excluded is one who I first encountered four years ago. I’ve tried to speak to him *so* many times and every time he makes a point of deliberately blanking me. And there were several other posts in the same vein. Pots chirping in calling kettles black. The squabble rattled on for most of the day; eventually ending up with people kissing and hugging and making up (as these things usually end up).

But it made me think. Is there a geo-in-crowd? No. there is not. There are several groups who seem to do their own things, and there is one (rather fluid) group who seems to do all sorts of fun stuff. I suppose I’m part of that crowd. But we don’t have a monopoly on doing fun stuff. Anyone can join in. Or go climb trees or sail boats on their own.

I’m reminded of the time a dozen of us went to the cinema to seen “Men in Black II” dressed as men (and ladies) in black. A passing thug stopped us, turned to his thug mates and asked “why don’t we do anything like this?

I then saw I’d missed out on something good – The Rocky Horror show had been on in Canterbury all last week. Several groups of friends had been along to see it… no-one asked me… And I started sulking again.



I then drove round to collect "Daddy’s Little Angel TM" and "Stormageddon - Bringer of Destruction TM" and we went out to Badger’s Hill garden centre at Chilham. They’ve got animals there and we thought we might take the littlun for a lesson in advanced mammalian recognition. He was fine with horses and pigs, and he recognised statues of cats, dogs, rabbits and ra-ras. (A ra-ra is a lion!)  but llamas did stretch him somewhat, and he didn’t have a clue when it came to maras.

He seemed to like the animals, but like all toddlers he lost interest after half an hour and wanted to go to the playpark. So we playparked for a little, then had coffee and cake. Cake is always good.

I took a few photos whilst we were there. I do that.



As it was just up the road we popped to the pond shop to get a humungous bag of Koi food. The fish had scoffed all the stuff we had at home. We then drove home; Sam had managed to lock himself out (woops!)

I dropped off my passengers and came home for an afternoon of dull. Firstly I sat on the front garden path and pulled all the weeds out from between the flagstones. I really need to lift them all and re-lay them but that is rather a long way down my list of priorities. I then put the hose pipe away; that had only been unraveled for six months. I then strimmed the lawn edges and mowed the lawn. By the time I’d then pulled the bindweed from the gravel my back was somewhat painful, and by face was glowing with sunburn. So I came inside and got a little bored with coming the dog so I went back out and trimmed back all that which was growing over the hedge from next door. I was emptying the fourth dustbin full of clippings into the garden recycle bin when "er indoors TM" arrived home from her week’s holiday. We unpacked her stuff and hopefully she’ll cook me some tea in a minute.

For the last week I’ve lived off of pizza, toast, and the goodwill of others.

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