27 October 2016 (Thursday) - Wrotham

"er indoors TM" spoon-fed "Furry Face TM" his brekkie this morning. He’s not ill; just being rather fussy. He seems to have gone off of the Pedigree Chum dog food pouches we’ve been getting for him. It is odd; I can’t get used to the idea of a dog that isn’t greedy. Previous dogs would eat anything and everything; but if Fudge doesn’t like something he’ll go hungry rather that eating it.
Over a spot of brekkie I found a really good cover of a Sparks song on Facebook. I tried to find out more about the band that had done this cover and then all sorts of windows popped up and my lap-top told me it had found malware and that Windows Defender was removing it. So much for the seemingly constant messages I get about Windows Defender being switched off.
Mind you immediately after this I got an invitation to join the Romney Marsh Morrismen. Windows Defender failed utterly there. As if I would be interested in that… Morris Dancers boil my piss. Morris Dancing on the Romney Marsh is *not* part of a tradition going back hundreds of years. In some parts of the country it may well be, but the first Morris Dancers in Kent appeared in 1946. They all have the sort of pewter tankard that your aunt buys you for your eighteenth birthday, they wear smocks, and when you talk to them they put on a West Country accent for no apparent reason.

I went and had a little lie down…

Once I’d calmed down I popped the lead onto my dog and we set off to Wrotham. There is a series of geocaches in the area based on Anne Boleyn. Regular readers of this drivel may recall I walked it on 1 March 2015 when I blogged “For a hike it was ideal; for a geo-series... the hides were great, but (not wishing to be critical) in all honesty I did feel that they were rather spread out. There were twenty eight caches in the series; there was probably space for over forty along the way”.
The chap who’d hidden the caches read that and at the time sent me a rather nice email saying that he thought people didn’t want too many caches, but others had also intimated that there was room for more caches, so he added a few more. And in the meantime a Church Micro and a Village Sign cache had appeared in the area. And when I was there last I solved a field puzzle to collect when I was next in the area.
I’d heard a gang of friends were going to walk that series today. The boss said I could take some leave, and so a walk round Wrotham it was.

We had an excellent walk. The weather was glorious. It is nearly November and we were all walking in T-shirts. Fudge behaved himself perfectly and was off the lead for much of the walk. We saw squirrels and rabbits and buzzards, and after meeting some very friendly horses we had a rather frightening experience with a pigeon.
Finding ourselves only a short distance from a pub at mid-day we sat in the beer garden and washed a picnic lunch down with a pint of Late Red.

There’s no denying that the walk was a tad hilly. Perhaps parking and starting at the highest point was a bad move; it meant we had to climb all the way up when we were at the end of what turned out to be an eleven mile walk. And “Hannah” said that from where we’d started we actually descended over three hundred metres to the lowest point of the walk. And as we walked round we had one or two other serious ups and downs too. I was rather aching by the time we got back to the cars. Gordon’s sat-nav was a tad worse for wear by that point too; the power-off button had fallen off somewhere along the way. Woops!

Unlike on our last walk I’d remembered to put the memory card into my camera. I took a few photos. You can see them by clicking here.

I’d underestimated how long the walk would tell, so once home I very quickly fed Fudge. He was hungry for once and scoffed his tea whilst I zoomed about. I then settled him and sped round to Steve and Sarah’s. Arriving with five minutes to spare, we had a rather good fish supper (from the Fish Inn) then had an astro club committee meeting.
Loads discussed; loads planned.

And then I spent fifteen minutes driving round the local roads trying to find somewhere to park. I eventually found somewhere in William Road (in geo-speak that is three caches away!)

Oh – and my mum had her heart surgery today. A five hour operation – all went well. She’s currently fast asleep. As she should be…


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