7 October 2018 (Sunday) - Merle Common



Finding myself wide awake at two o’clock I got up and watched an episode of the new series of “Big Mouth” on Netflix. Whilst they are putting out the new episodes of “The Good Place” one each week, Netflix have put out all of the new “Big Mouth” episodes at once. I prefer that…
The voice of the “Shame Wizard” was rather familiar – it was supplied by the chap who played Remus Lupin in the “Harry Potter” films.
I went back to bed and eventually nodded off. The alarm went; I got up again. I came down to find a light bulb had blown. I *hate* these halogen light bulbs – they don’t last.
Over brekkie I had a look at the Internet. I had a friend request on Facebook from “Ryan Gunawan” who (like “Maria Tensriana”) uses social media to share his interest in hard-core pornography. I’ve reported “Ryan” to the Facebook feds, but I reported “Maria” over a week ago and he/she/it is still posting pictures of unspeakable acts of hedonism with her boyfriend’s willy.
On a slightly more demure note, Amazon was offering me two quid off of the prices of books I didn’t want; that was a bargain.

We wasted a little while trying to find what we’d done with our gaiters, then had an early start. Partly so as not to be late, partly not to get stuck in traffic (with Ashford being closed for a 10k road race) but mostly so we could collect Rolo. Cheryl says he needs more exercise and as we were going on an epic walk anyway…
With Rolo aboard the car we set off up the motorway. As we drove "er indoors TM"’s sat-nav had an episode. With some traffic congestion half way along the M25, it tried to divert us ten miles north up the M20. The diversion was just adding miles onto the route which would still lead us back to the congested area – what was the sat-nav thinking of? Still, it did better than Karl’s sat-nav which (for no adequately explored reason) had them approaching the car park in Staffhurst Woods from *entirely* the wrong direction.

But errant sat-nats notwithstanding we were all soon together and set off on a rather good stroll through the Surrey countryside. The countryside was rather pretty; the fields and lanes and wood were beautiful. We played in the river. And there were no hills. We saw horses and sheep and alpacas and what looked like llamas. Unlike last week we only saw one buzzard. And when rooting in a hedge I found a rather large slow worm. We found one or two footpaths which were rather overgrown, but such is life.
As we walked we crossed the Greenwich meridian, the line at which “east” on a map changes to “west”. We spent some time playing silly beggars and trying to get screen shots on the change on our phones.

Geocache-wise it wasn’t *quite* what we’d been expecting. We’d set off with all good intentions of walking the SWHC series of caches and then diverting off to walk the TAN series as well. But I must admit my heart sank when I read the description of the cache series and saw mention of something which was archived three years ago. As we walked we were somewhat slowed by the number of stiles we encountered. Getting three dogs over so many stiles slowed us considerably. And the cache hides were somewhat tricky. It wasn’t long before we decided that the TAN series of caches could wait for another day. We logged “did not find” on two caches; I’m pretty sure both were missing.

After seven miles we found ourselves at “The Grumpy Mole” where we had a few pints of Grumpy Mole best bitter, and the dogs tried to pick a fight with “Dorothy” – a rather sweet bulldog.

I took several photos as we walked. Once home I put them on the internet and over a rather good bit of dinner realized that the new series of Doctor Who had started and we’d forgotten to set the SkyPlus. Reading all the comments on Facebook I get the distinct impression that we didn’t miss anything. Which is a shame…

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