19 August 2020 (Wednesday) - Emergency Plan B

A year or so ago the BBC’s weather forecasting app was rather good. These days it is utter rubbish. When we get home I’m going to send the BBC a formal complaint about the thing. For the last four days we’ve been expecting rain in the next hour, and during the course of that next hour the BBC just move the prediction back another hour.

But that rain finally got here this morning. I woke to the sound of rain.

I got up and posted the photos of yesterday’s outing to Facebook where it didn’t take long to garner quite a few “likes”. I then did all the geo-admin from yesterday’s outing. And with everyone still asleep I peered into the internet whilst scoffing the last of last night’s curry. The curry made for a very good first breakfast as I looked at all the photos from the friends’ wedding that took place yesterday. What with England having effectively put weddings on hold, they got married in Scotland. It looked like all went well.

Fudge came down and asked to go outside. I opened the door, he looked at the rain and turned around. Foolishly I insisted he went for a tiddle, and he went and played silly beggars in the rain and wouldn’t come back in again. I think he was chasing the fat pigeon.

 

We had a rather good fry-up brekkie, The dogs liked the bacon. And with the rain showing no sign of abating, Karl and I went shopping. First of all to the Three Castles Brewery (as they *did* want our money unlike the Stonehenge Brewery). We knew what we wanted, but I had to sample the ciders to make sure I got what was best for "er indoors TM". I staggered out of there (into a torrential downpour) and we then went into Pewsey and to the co-op. The place was festooned with signs saying that face coverings were mandatory, there was an announcement on the loudspeakers telling us to wear face coverings. Not a single member of staff had one on.

Mind you one customer had tied a sock over his face.

 

We came back to base, sampled the beer, and had a game of “Blokus”. A firm favourite game of mine; the triangular version is very different to the square one. I came third, which was probably better than I deserved.

After a light lunch we spent a few minutes braving the drizzle in the garden. Treacle and Pogo got rather over-excited chasing apples that were thrown for them; Fudge got rather filthy digging out the rabbit hole that he’s taken to excavating.

The plan had ben to take the dogs for a short walk as the rain cleared, but the rain didn’t clear. It got worse. So we got the dogs inside, and after Fudge had been scrubbed (he didn’t want to go in the shower but had no choice) we had a game of “Cluedo”. I hadn’t played it for years, and rather struggled a bit. Eventually it turns out that I’d been victimising Professor Plums as it was me that did it.

We then had a rather frustrating few minutes whilst I tried to program “Hannah” for tomorrow and others tried to do various other Internet-related stuff. There are two wi-fi networks in the cottage which suddenly decided to randomly take turns in working, and we were (and still are) manually swapping network to transmit to the universe.

 

We played another round of “Cluedo” (with which I got on a lot better) then I thought I’d order our dinner as a take-away from the pub.

Oh, how I laughed…

Once we’d decided what we wanted (and that took some deciding(!)) I phoned the local pub. The woman at the other end clearly wasn’t paying attention. I explained we wanted a take-out for this evening. She was fine with that. We would collect it this evening. Not a problem. I confirmed they could do this evening, she was only too happy with that. I told her what we wanted, and she had questions about every single thing I said. And then she asked what time we wanted it for. When I said “as soon as possible” she announced that “as soon as possible” was tomorrow as they were over-run this evening.

I took a deep breath and phoned the chip shop.

 

"er indoors TM" drove me to the Dragon chip shop in Pewsey where I saw a sign in the window saying they only took cash. What was that about? The shop up the road had a cashpoint machine and I got some money out. Can you believe this was the first cash withdrawal I have made in over six months? What with coronageddon I’ve been using card and contactless payments and haven’t taken cash from a machine sine Valentine’s day?

We got out fish and sausages and chips and took them home. They were in a box which was rather warm on my lap, and once home we had a really good fish (and sausage) supper enjoyed by all (especially the dogs). We followed it with cream cakes (none for the dogs!), and in something of a first we then watched the news. With all that is going on in the UK, the BBC seem to devote a *lot* of air-time to the American election.

 

A glass of port slipped down nicely, and I went to bed before I fell asleep. I took a few photos today. Despite the rain (which never stopped once) we certainly made the most of the day…

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