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6 September 2018 (Thursday) - Busy, Busy


I’d set the alarm for this morning, but as always when I’ve set an alarm I was wide awake well before it was due to go off. I came downstairs and found Fudge laying on the door mat fast asleep. Against my better judgement I left him there; he has taken to guarding the hallway and going absolutely mental every time the slightest sound comes from next door.
I made myself some toast and had a look at the Internet so see if I’d missed much overnight.

As usual there were those still pedalling racial hatred on Facebook. All these memes about how illegal immigrants get ten million quid a day whilst the war-hero-pensioner doesn’t get a pot to piss in… they are *all* lies. Just copying the key words of the hateful memes into Google and adding the word “snopes” is usually enough to give you a link to a reputable website which shows what a pack of lies these memes are.
I challenged a couple this morning and got the reply “I just copied it from someone else”. This begs the questions why are people believing this sort of rubbish, and from whom are they copying these lies?
It has been my experience that there *are* a lot of immigrant workers in the UK. And it has been my experience that they are doing the jobs that the average Brit won’t do. Once they’ve all been sent back on the next banana boat and there is no food in the shops as no one will harvest it and we are all dying of rickets and scurvy (in our mid-twenties) because there’s no doctors left, I shall take great delight in saying “I told you so”.
I also had an email from LinkedIn telling me about the latest antics of Nicholas Hill, Steven Turner, Ross Harrison and Ron Roser. I wonder who those people are? Mind you LinkedIn had also emailed me to tell me why my flight is always so full, so (bearing in mind I’ve been on two aeroplanes in the last ten years) I think it fair to say that LinkedIn was talking rubbish. Again.
There was a lot of that on the Internet this morning.

I woke the dogs (Fudge was raring to go; Treacle not so) and took them for their morning constitutional rather earlier than usual. My car had given me a “check emissions” warning message a few days ago so I’d made an appointment to have it checked. As I pulled off I noticed the warning had gone. Mind you, these things are best checked out.
I left the car with the nice people in the garage and I and the dogs walked home. As we came through Frog’s Island a passing thug took a shine to Treacle and warned me that when my staffie grows up she won't get on with my dachshund. His face was a picture when I thanked him for his advice and assured him I would avoid those breeds
We walked home past the road works. Part of our road is blocked off for “emergency road works”. I posted on one of the local Facebook groups to ask if anyone knew why the road was closed. Within ten minutes I had replies that the road was closed because there were road works. (These people are allowed to vote and do jury service!)
After a few more minutes someone who *wasn’t* a total doom-brain posted that the road had been closed for emergency gas repairs as there was a gas leak somewhere near the bakery.

We got home and I fed the dogs. Treacle flatly refused to touch her food until Fudge had finished his and gone back to his basket.
I put some washing on and did some dull gardening. I got the lawn mowed and cut back some of the roses and various shrubs hanging over the fence from next door. Then I was rather petty… The clematis from next door was climbing all over the arbour by our pond. I wish it wouldn’t do that. I’ve whinged at next door several times only to be completely blanked, so I intricately cut each tendril of clematis that was holding it to the fence between our gardens, then hoiked the entire lot over to her side. I *know* it is petty, but what else can I do? If I don’t do something about their greenery it takes over our garden (we’ve had rose vines reaching literally half-way across our garden in the past). I’ve tried speaking to her; she looks at me as though I am the shit on her shoe and she walks away. Hopefully this might have some effect.

I hung out the washing and put more in to scrub. Whilst it scrubbed I got a coat of paint onto the front of the house. It doesn’t really look any different to how it was before, but if I can get a coat on there once every six months it might stop looking any worse.
As I painted the world and his wife walked past and suggested I might like to paint their houses for them; each person feeling they were oh-so-funny and that their comment was oh-so-original.

Half way through my lunch sandwich the garage phoned. They’d given my car a good going over and found a couple of faults on the fault detector gizmo, but each fault triggers the other so they didn’t know what the actual fault was. They suggested that they reset the fault detector gizmo and that I took the car and bring it back the very moment it gives an alarm so they know what the fault is.

I walked the dogs over to get the car, and seeing how it was still only early in the afternoon I had an idea to drive the car to Folkestone, walk the dogs a little, and drive back to see if I could get the emissions alarm to go off again. We drove to Folkestone; I had this idea that some of the geocaches there might mark out a walk for us.
For once they didn’t.
We started off following a series of caches called “It’s a Bug’s Life”; probably good fun insect-themed containers when put out, it didn’t help that the first two were missing. It also didn’t help that the footpaths marking the route were little more than thinner parts of bramble patches. After the second failure I called up all the details of the other caches on my phone… I *should* have done my homework and checked out the route *before* we came down to Folkestone. Of the twelve caches in the series one had been logged as broken over a year ago, two had already been archived, one has had a building site spring up around it… I gave up on that walk.
As we were in the area we had a look for a cache in a nearby church. This one involved getting some information in the graveyard. I failed here too, but I did find the grave of Samuel Plimsoll – him who invented the “Plimsoll Line”.
We then made our way back to the car. As we walked past a school some little brat pulled Treacle’s tail. The brat’s mother looked round and asked why my dog was yapping at her brat, and frankly refused to believe that her brat would ever pull a dog’s tail. I wasted a few minutes trying to be polite, then said a swear word (or two) at her and marched off. Eventually we got back to the car - it took some doing. A building site had sprung up blocking our footpath.

We got home; I got the washing in and sparked up the telly as the dogs snored. It wasn’t long before I too was snoring. Today’s been rather busy.
"er indoors TM" will be home soon. I wonder if she’ll notice I’ve painted the house?

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