12 March 2019 (Tuesday) - After the Night Shift


After a rather busy night shift I made my way home. As I drove down the motorway the Secretary for the Environment Michael Gove was being interviewed on the radio. He was one of the leading lights in the run-up to the Brexit referendum three years ago, but now he seems to have pretty much vanished into obscurity. He was talking about today’s Parliamentary vote on the Prime Minister’s deal which was comprehensively rejected a few weeks ago. He was most insistent that there not be a second referendum even though that was effectively exactly what Parliament was doing today.

Once home I said hello to "er indoors TM", loaded the hounds into the boot of my car (they seem to have latched on to the idea of being boot-dogs) and drove down to Woodchurch. A geocache went live there last night and no one had claimed the First to Find.
There is this etiquette when logging a First to Find that you make out that you “happened to be in the area” or was “just passing” or “had an appointment nearby”. None of those applied to me today. I went to Woodchurch deliberately to try for that First to Find. And I got it. I was rather pleased about that.
(It since turned out that I beat two other people by minutes)
I’d had my fun; it was time for the dogs to have theirs. We all went back to the car and drove to Orlestone woods where we had a very good walk. I was able to let the dogs off of the leads before they jumped out of the car, so we had none of this dragging-me-up-the-street nonsense that spoils so many walks. We wandered round the woods; the dogs all sniffled and snuffled as we went. We met one other dog-walker and the encounter passed off without incident.
I took a few photos as we walked.
Orlestone woods is only a quarter of an hour away in the car; I might just drive the dogs down there more often rather than go round the park; if only for the sake of my nerves.

We came home, and I marched all the dogs to the bath. All had been swamp-monsters in the woods and so all needed a wash. Some more than others. Some just needed a quick hose-down of the paws; some needed the entire lower half scrubbing.
And with dogs and myself hosed down I went to bed for a while.

I woke four hours later and put some washing in to scrub. I scoffed toast, then ironed shirts. As I pootled about I put a film on Netflix. Solis was… Well, I won’t sugar-coat it. It was utterly crap and I turned it off half way through. For science-fiction to work it needs believable characters. And for all that the science *is* fiction, it has to be plausible. Falling into the sun makes for a good story-line *if* you are near enough to the sun to fall into it. The starship Enterprise travelling at warp speed would have got to the sun slower than the protagonist in “Solis”.
Instead I watched the last couple of episodes of Ricky Gervais’s “After Life”,

"er indoors TM" came home and boiled up a very good bit of scran. We washed it down with a bottle of plonk whilst watching “Bake Off”. And with al the plonk washed down I had a go at the last of the current bottle of port.
I say “current bottle of port”; there’s one or two ready in reserve…

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