27 January 2019 (Sunday) - Forty-Two


As I scoffed my toast I watched an episode of “The Young Offenders” in which our heroes obtained a duck, and then an episode of “Rocket City Rednecks” in which the rednecks made a drone capable of lifting a person. It didn’t lift anyone very high, but if made for entertaining viewing.
I then had a look at the Internet and saw that the place where I used to work now has its own Twitter account, and was cross-posting onto Facebook. How times change… it wasn’t that long ago that just mentioning it on social media was grounds for a disciplinary hearing. As I was handed a written warning I was told that this was the official policy, and any mention of the place on social media was actually bringing it into disrepute. Not that I’m bitter…

The plan for today had been to walk around the top of Bluebell Hill. But the weather forecast hadn’t been good, and so we’d cancelled our little scheme. Waking to torrential rain made me think that perhaps this was for the best. I’d nearly fallen over (several times) in the surface mud on a ten-minute walk round Aldington’s village green yesterday and the overnight rain would only have made things more slippery.
Such a shame.
I braved the wind and the rain and went out to the garden to harvest the dog turds. A grim job, but when you have dogs which crap as much as mine do, it is a job that needs doing. I raked in three toilet-fulls. Some would see that as a result. I didn’t.

We settled the dogs and drove out toward Margate. As we drove so the rain stopped and the sun came out.
We stopped off in Birchington for geocachical reasons. On Friday a new geocache had gone live there, and this morning still no one had logged a First to Find. We found the cache; two other people had found it yesterday, but no one had actually logged the thing on-line. There is a school of thought that feels you shouldn’t log a new cache right away as this gives people the idea that they might be First to Find and so people chase out after it.
There is another school of thought which disagrees. I can see both sides of the argument.

We drove on into Westbrook where we spent the morning with "Daddy’s Little Angel TM". I spent much of the morning being ignored by "Stormageddon - Bringer of Destruction TM" and trying to find the phone of the most recent fruit of my loin. She’d lost it. It turned up where she’d left it, as it so often does.

At mid-day we said our goodbyes, and as we drove away so the sky turned grey and the rain started again. Feeling peckish we stopped off at McDonalds in Whitfield, then drove up the A20 towards home. We got to Sellindge during a break in the rain, so we had a little look for a geocache which hasn’t been found for over two years. I must admit I’d had something of a prompt on this one, so I had an inkling of where to look. I won’t say it was buried, but… We found it. Another geo-resuscitation. Since I started hunting out these old caches over the summer, I’ve now resuscitated over thirty.

We then drove on to Tesco for some odds and ends. We thought we might try their little gadget with which you scan all your shopping as you go; saving a lot of farting around at the tills. It was a shame that they chose us for a random check to make sure we’d scanned everything we were taking out of the shop. It was even more of a shame that he implication was that we were the scum of the Earth who couldn’t be trusted with the scanning gadget. I can see that people might abuse this way of shopping, but I’ve never once had my purchases checked at a self-service checkout. The principle is the same, and offence has been taken. I’ve emailed Tesco’s complaints department to tell them so. I wonder if they will reply? I suspect they might see this as the shallow attempt to get some free money-off vouchers which it probably is.

We arrived at Pets at Home just as the heavens opened again. Pausing only briefly to get the dog food we’d forgotten at Tesco we came home. Once the rain eased up we took the dogs round the park. Needless to say, the rain didn’t hold off.
Pogo disgraced himself a couple of times on our walk. If he wasn’t trying to pick a fight, he was trying to “do the conga as only a dog can”. I wish he wouldn’t do either.

With walk done we came home to dry out. A cuppa and a hot cross bun, then I took myself up to the attic for an hour to add a graveyard to the parish church of St Gutsache. I had a rummage round my minifigures trying to find a character who looked vaguely vicar-ish. Over the years I’ve collected a lot of Lego minifigures, but all are specific characters. There are very few “average people” characters. I found one all in black that looked rather ecclesiastical, but on reflection it looks like Severus Snape out of Harry Potter.

"er indoors TM" boiled up a rather good pizza for tea; we scoffed it whilst watching the 2005 re-make of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. I’ve seen it before; it’s not a bad film. Actually it’s a really good film. But being a film version of a TV series which was an adaptation of the book of a radio series, I’d seen (heard and read) it all before…

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