Every morning as my lap-top boots up it shows a picture
from somewhere round the world. The current picture looked rather familiar… it
was from Butchart
Gardens in Canada. I’ve been there. Looking at the place on-line it
looks beautiful; I can remember it being rather tedious. Isn’t that negative of
me… but ornamental gardens often are tedious. After five minutes of looking at
flowers you really have seen it all.
Mind you I went there with the scouts. Much of my memories
of scouting are of utter tedium; shepherding a dozen ungrateful brats around
places where they didn’t want to be tended to suck the fun out of everything. I
packed up being a scout leader when I realised it was *supposed* to be fun. Looking back I think I’d been doing it wrong
for some time before I finally knocked it on the head.
I had a little snigger when I looked at Facebook this
morning. I saw an advert for “Montgomery
Scott Blended Scotch Whisky”. From my days in active Trekkie-ing
I just know that no end of people are going to hand over a small fortune for
something they would never otherwise buy if it didn’t have a Star Trek logo on
it. I can remember being at the “Star
Trek Experience” in Bournemouth over twenty years ago when a pencil set (like you’d see in the pound store) was
up for sale for forty quid purely because someone had printed “Star Trek” on it. People were buying
them.
I wish I’d had that idea first.
Other than that there wasn’t a lot kicking off on Facebook
for once.
My in-box was equally uninspiring. Amazon had sent me
emails suggesting I buy that which I had already bought. NHS jobs suggested I
apply for jobs I didn’t really want. LinkedIn had sent me a load of gibberish
written in a foreign language (I don’t
speak “management”).
I gave up and took the dogs for a walk. We got half way
round the park before the rain hit. We came home again.
I spent five minutes loading rubbish
into the car, then settled the dogs and drove off. I had a few chores to do on
the way to work. First of all to the vet's where my piss boiled somewhat. Fudge
and Treacle are due for their flea treatments. I thought we had loads of the
stuff in the cupboard; we'd run out. I phoned the vet yesterday evening to
arrange to collect some this morning only to be told I didn't have to arrange
anything in advance; I could just turn up in the morning. So I turned up and
explained why I was there and I waited and waited. Getting the flea treatments
took an age. I asked if things might have been better had I phoned last night to
say I was coming; the nice lady on reception said that would have been for the
best, and perhaps I might do that next time. I thought about mentioning that I
had actually done just that, but sometimes it is best not to stir these things
more than they need to be.
I then took a car load of rubbish to the
tip. Most of it went into the right skips, but I had a broken decanter that was
too big for the hole in the glass recycling skip. I asked the nice man where I
should stick it. Surprisingly he didn't give the obvious answer, but said it
goes in the glass recycling. I explained patiently that it was too big for the
hole. Consternation was achieved all round as all the tip operatives huddled
together trying to decide what to do when something is too big for the hole. After
five minutes they put the knacked decanter on to a shelf next to an old clock
and said I should leave it with them.
I did so.
I then went to Longacres garden centre (Bybrook Barn to most people). Yesterday
during our run-in with the dog warden she'd said that she was pleased to see
that Fudge had his address and our name on a tag on his collar. She completely
missed the fact that he hadn't. Fudge
and Treacle had tags with my phone number (and
nothing else) and Pogo had nothing at all. I thought I'd better get that
sorted before we have another ding-dong with her (it can only be a matter of time...)
The pet tag gizmo at the vets had gone
west, but the one at Bybrook Barn was working. The nice lady behind the counter
(who operates it) wouldn't take my
instructions for the tags verbally; she insisted that I wrote down what I
wanted to appear on them. And having written down my name, address, post code
and phone number I then had to spell each one out to her as she couldn't read
my writing.
Eventually I handed over thirty quid (ten quid per tag) to find she'd spelt
"Beaver" (as in Beaver Road) wrong on each tag...
Pausing only briefly to fail to locate a
geocache in Barming I went in to work where the canteen was doing a rather good
lasagne. It was really tasty and filling. I'm sure it is in no way connected
with the fact that I was farting all afternoon.
And can you believe it is now two years
since we took on Treacle. Where has the time gone?
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