7 March 2020 (Saturday) - A Walk Round Norton


I didn’t sleep that well. For some reason "er indoors TM" had brought a candle up to the bedroom and its flickering was rather disturbing. Not that I would dare tell her that. When I finally did doze off, Pogo made himself comfortable behind me and started scratching my back.

I got up and stood on the scales. In one week of diet I’ve lost four pounds. I say “diet”; that’s not so much “diet” as not getting a cheeky bar of chocolate on the way out of work and not having a bowl of cereals for supper. I shell keep this up for a while.
As I got off the scales I manage to get a sliver of glass in my foot. Where did that come from?

I had toast and coffee (three hundred calories) and peered into the Internet. I’d had an email from the nice people who provide the infrastructure (big word!) for this blog. “Alex” had made a comment on my blog entry about when I went to the eye clinic last year. He’d tried to comment with a link to some spamming website, but I wasn’t having any of it.
I had a look at Facebook. Quite a few people had offered plastic sheeting to help with bodging the broken car window for which I was grateful. Other than that, not a lot had happened.
I spent a few minutes looking about on-line to see what local pubs had a function room; I’ve got a vague idea to stage a “fun night” for this geocaching “Community Celebration Event” I’ve been given. An evening of bingo, beetle drives and a quiz.
The trouble with this idea though is that it requires people to spend money.

We got the dogs (and ourselves) organised and drove out to Norton church where we met Karl Tracey and Charlotte. Together we set off for a little wander. The “G4me On” series of caches was put out as a little gift to me… a while ago a friend said he was going to walk a series of geocaches I’d hidden. I gave him a few paper logs to replace any that were wet. It turned out that very few were wet, and so he used the logs in creating this new geo-series instead.
We had a rather good walk. Treacle climbed trees, we walked field and footpath and country lane. We saw loads of frogspawn in the swamps. Bearing in mind how much rain we’ve had recently the fields and paths were amazingly dry.
Geocache-wise it was an excellent series. Some hides were rather straightforward; some were rather more challenging. We replaced one cache... as we searched a rather nosey old biddy came bustling up and wanted to know if we were lost. She seemed rather put out when we said that we were find and didn’t need any help from her.

Three hours and six miles after we started saw us back at the cars. From here it was only a short drive to Doddington and the Chequers. The Chequers is an old favourite pub of ours; we’ve been there for a pint or two a few times in the last few years. Today we went for dinner. And a good dinner it was too. Despite the three pints of stout, being on a diet I went for the mushroom stroganoff, and I think I made an excellent choice. Mind you, everyone else’s dinner looked rather good too.
You can see photos of the dinners and of our walk by clicking here.

We said our goodbyes, and in a novel break with tradition I stayed awake for the journey home. As we drove we tried to listen to Steve who was broadcasting his show on Radio Ashford. Unfortunately he was interviewing someone whose music was in a field of its own, and (quite frankly) it would have sounded better in a field on its own. Reluctantly we turned it off.

We came home. The dogs were soon snoring. "er indoors TM" set off to visit "Daddy’s Little Angel TM" and "Stormageddon - Bringer of Destruction TM". I spent an hour or so doing the ironing (dull!) they watched yesterday’s episode of Star Trek: Picard. I was amazed at how un-natural one of the major protagonists appeared to be. Plastic surgery perhaps?
It was a shame I spent quite so much of the evening asleep in front of the telly…

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