I had a rather good night’s sleep;
waking a little later than usual. Over brekkie I watched an old episode of “Dad’s Army” before having my usual
morning look at the Internet.
I read something which frankly amazed me
on Facebook. There is someone on my Facebook friends list; like most people on
that list he is hardly a friend; just someone I know. Like a *lot* of people I know one of his parents
has recently died. We’ve been there in the last couple of months; it is not
good. But what amazed me was this chap was using Facebook to try to crowd-fund
his mother’s funeral.
At the risk of giving offence here,
don’t people make arrangements for when the inevitable happens? It didn’t take
me more than a minute to come up with this
website
which shows that the average cost of dropping dead in the south of England is
about eight thousand quid. It is bad enough that your children are going to be
distraught (they better be!) without
saddling them with eight thousand pounds worth of debt. And that’s without
giving all the mourners a drinkie. Realistically I’m over half way through this
game of life, and so I’ve taken out insurance to stump up for when my number is
up. Doesn’t everyone of a certain age?
I went to the co-op to get a sandwich
for lunch. The people in the co-op were giving away flowers. Bunches of flowers
which cost four quid yesterday were free today as they’d gone past their
sell-by date. Can you believe it? Flowers have a sell-by date!
I got some as something for nothing is
always good.
I then drove round to collect "My
Boy TM". Usually we’d go for a fry-up but today we had to
drop Lacey at school after brekkie and she had no truck with the workman’s
cafes where we’d usually go. But (to keep
her old Grandad happy) she agreed to having a McBreakfast.
McBreakfast was good; I like McDonalds –
you get people from all walks of life in there. There were retired couples, businessmen
in suits, workmen, schoolkids as well as us. All enjoying a sausage and egg
McMuffin.
We dropped Lacey at school, and we went
on to Shirkoak for a day’s fishing. We drove through the rain, and set up in
the rain. The rain was a feature for the morning; it finally stopped about 2pm.
But we didn’t get *that* wet. We
arrived to find one of the normal people already fishing, but after half an
hour he made some lame excuse and went home.
Fishing-wise we then had the lake to
ourselves for the rest of the day, but we did have two sets of people coming
round who had heard about the place and had come for a look-see.
There was a minor dilemma in the early
evening. For much of the day we’d been watching a mother duck swimming about
with a single baby following her. Shortly after 5pm the baby came paddling
about on his own; plaintively chirping for his mother. Mother was nowhere to be
seen, and one of the other ducks was obviously picking on the baby. We managed
to distract the bully with fishing bait, but we were rather worried about the baby.
There wasn’t really anything we could do to help, but that didn’t stop us
worrying. After about twenty minutes of rather pathetic chirping from the
littlun, the mother duck appeared in the
sky and dropped into the pond in much the same way that a brick would. There was
a rather heart-warming reunion, and mother and baby swam off together (to our relief).
Fishing-wise the day was busy. Not as
busy as it has been at Shirkoak on some days, but certainly busier than the last
time we went. "My Boy TM" made a point of counting
how many fish he caught but he lost count at forty which was some time in the
early afternoon. I didn’t catch as many as he did, but I would estimate I had
between forty and fifty carp, averaging a couple of pounds (in weight) each.
My biggest fish of the day was about
five and a half pounds in weight, the first fruit of my loin had one which was
about a pound heavier. We’ve been fishing this lake on and off for some time
now; we don’t seem to catch anything any bigger than six pounds in weight. But
when "My Boy TM" was young he would regularly catch
fish up to twenty pounds in weight from this lake, I wonder what’s been going
on – do fish shrink?
I
took a few photos whilst we fished, and we even made a video of our exploits.
If you like fishing, the video will just fly by. If you don’t like fishing the
video will be like watching paint dry. But it does feature me rather prominently
so time spent watching it won’t be wasted (if
you like that sort of thing).
I think that I might have strained my
elbow with all the fish I caught…
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