I slept reasonably well; I got up to find Fudge
asleep on the landing again. Does he like it there? It's not as though he
sleeps there as he gets there and can get no further - there is a little basket
in the corner of the bedroom for him as he can't jump on to the bed.
Yesterday as I left home I mentioned
that I saw a new geocache had gone live not far from work. It was still
unfound when I went to bed last night, and I found myself wondering... I
checked my phone when I got up - the thing still hadn't had a find logged. So
as I scoffed granola I planned my mission. Parking, how to walk from the
parking, and with plans made I left home when most people would have still been
fast asleep.
As I drove up the motorway the pundits on the radio
were trying to make light of the fact that the BBC are now seen as Public Enemy
#1 following yesterday's revelations about how much they pay their top stars.
And those revelations have been further muddied by the fact that apparently
only *some* of the fees paid
have been disclosed. And it doesn’t help that the poorer pensioners now have to
pay for the BBC licence which previously they got for free.
I'm sorry, but this shouldn’t be an issue. All the
time the BBC is paid for out of public money they simply cannot pay big bucks
for the celebrities. After all it isn't as though they need to. Go to any
amateur local theatre group or local radio station. There are dozens of people
in every town who would be every bit as good as those that the BBC employ, and
would do a better job for a fraction of the price.
Can you *really* justify paying someone twice the Prime Minister's salary for an hour
or so a few times a week?
I did think my FTF hopes had been thwarted when the
traffic on the motorway came to a standstill. But two minutes after stopping,
all the traffic started again for no reason that I could fathom. I followed my
sat-nav's instructions and soon I was in a back street in Loose. After a little
wander up and down the road I found the footpath I needed. I went sown a rather
steep hill and soon found the little film pot I wanted. It had been there since
Monday night and no one else had been near. That was a ridiculously long time
for a cache not to be found in a very FTF-competitive area such as Kent.
I felt rather pleased with myself as I made my way
back to the car. As I walked I posted to the local Facebook geocaching page to
gloat.
That was a mistake.
I went into work for the early shift. At tea break
my phone beeped. The chap who had hidden that cache that I found this morning
was full of sarcasm about how he felt that I'd posted
spoilers about his hide by the photograph I'd posted on
Facebook. I hadn't, but I deleted what I'd posted to Facebook (just in case). I also
amended the written log I'd made. Rather than a few lines of "copy and paste story”, I
changed what I had written to "TFTC". In theory this stands for "thanks for the cache"; in
practice it is see as an insult to whoever put the cache out.
This petty trivial little bit of nonsense bothered
me far more than it should have done. I then spent much of the rest of the day
wondering if I still want to be part of the "Geocaching
in Kent" Facebook group. When I first started
sticking film pots under rocks that group was a source of help and
friendship. People would organise outings and trips and events through the
page. I used to run at least one such outing a month (every month for several years)
But over the last few months that
Facebook group has gone really downhill. The friends I’ve made over the years
post less and less, and more and more the page is attracting the half-wits and
the “special” ones and the
keyboard warriors who are out to cause a fight.
Only the other day someone who'd never posted
anything there before was being rather nasty to a friend who has contributed so
much to the hobby. A few weeks ago I was made to feel heartily sorry that I'd
bothered putting out a series of caches round King's Wood - and it was a
reviewer (one of the high-ups in geocaching) who had made me feel that way. And then someone appeared from
nowhere and claimed that I was deliberately feigning illness rather than
repairing broken film pots(?)
It never fails to amaze me how people can get so
nasty over such trivial matters. But for some years the "Geocaching in Kent"
Facebook group has risen above that sort of thing. Perhaps it will do
again? But I’ve decided that (as far as I am
concerned) the thing is on its final warning.
I did my bit at work; an early start made for an
early finish. I came home, and took the dogs round the park. As we walked we
met a few people who wanted to fuss all the dogs. They liked that. And then we
met a child who… I can only describe his actions as saying that he had a spazzy
fit. On seeing the dogs he started screaming and thrashing his arms and
screaming. His mother told me that he didn’t like dogs. I said that my dogs
probably didn’t like him either. The child stopped his stupidity immediately; clearly
no one had ever spoken to him like that before. I pointed out that the dogs
were a good ten yards away from him, and we walked off leaving the mother
shrieking at the child for no reason that I could fathom.
We came home. During the day the dogs had had
biscuits down for them. They had all ignored the biscuits so I fed the biscuits
to the koi. Suddenly all three wanted the biscuits.
"er
indoors TM"
then boiled up a rather good bit of dinner which we washed down with a bottle of plonk whilst watching “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey”.
I’m reliably informed that filming has started on
the third “Bill and Ted” film…
No comments:
Post a Comment