Despite a rather vivid nightmare in which I’d been acclaimed leader of a post-apocalyptic band of Armageddon-survivors I slept rather well. Over brekkie I watched an episode of “Drifters” in which our heroes were “doing the dirty deed” with varying degrees of success, then watched as my lap-top struggled into action. Last night it had done a Windows update, thereby leaving itself unable to do anything whilst the update sorted itself out for what seemed an age.
Eventually it got going. I saw that Gordon had been to Wales and been on that rather impressive zip-line. I quite fancy that, but don’t fancy going all the way to Wales. I’m told there’s one at Bluewater – and it would seem I’m not too heavy for it. Does anyone fancy a day out?
There wasn’t much else happening on-line. I had over seventy emails to say that people had found some of the geocaches I’d hidden, but on closer inspection they’d found them in May but had taken four months to tell the world. I wish people would log finds more promptly; I see a “Found It” and assume that all is well. I haven’t got time to fiddle about reading each and every log.
As I drove to work so the farming program was on the radio. The presenter was talking about how potatoes are a "high risk" crop. What can be "high risk" about a spud? I had a look on the Internet and I'm still none the wiser.
There was also an interview with a dairy farmer who has had to chuck out days loads of milk as the dairies can't provide lorries to come fetch the stuff. This was brought up in a wider context of shortages of all sorts of farm workers. The government were invited to send someone for an interview; they declined but gave a statement saying that they were aware of shortages of staff all through the farming industry. the obvious answer is to improve the worker's conditions and to pay them more money.
The farmer being interviewed said he'd re-advertised jobs for which he'd had no applicants offering ten per cent more money but still wasn't getting any interest. I suppose he'll have to offer even more cash - after all ten per cent of sod-all isn't much. Mind you where will that pay rise come from? How much will you pay for your dinner? A pig farmer being interviewed was saying that she couldn't compete with the price of imported pork.
I suppose UK farms are facing the consequences of having relied (for decades) on cheap foreign labour all of whom have now gone home.
And the French are getting more and more wound up about the USA – UK - Australia nuclear submarine deal. Apparently they found out that they'd lost the contract from reading the newspapers (which didn't impress them much!). There are loads of British people who will shed no tears over the French being upset. I'm just waiting to pay the price. *Every* time the French get the hump over anything at all they take it out on the British by causing delays at the ports, and so the lorries will queue back up the M20 again; poggering my journey to work.
I got to work for yet another weekend shift and did my bit. There was cake, which is always good, and at dinner time I went to the works canteen for lunch. Cherry pie and custard - very nice. But... when you have any sort of pie with custard how do you prepare it? Surely the pie goes in the bowl first and then the custard goes on top? What strange sort of person fills the bowl full of custard then tries to float the cherry pie on top? And then has to wipe all the custard off of the pie ladle?
At going home time I remembered the car’s parking brake had played up yesterday. It hadn’t played up on my way to work this morning and it didn’t play up on the way home. As I was driving past the garage who were going to be looking at the brake issue on Tuesday I thought I’d pop in and have a word. I explained that it played up once and now seemed to be fine. The chap behind the counter at the garage said that this is a common feature of electric parking brakes, he said that the one in his car does it all the time, and he asked why I was bringing my car to them when they aren’t able to deal with electric parking brakes. I suggested that maybe when asked if they could fix electric parking brakes they might in future say “no” rather than “yes”. Next time I’ll go to my usual garage. There is clearly a reason why my usual garage is booked up for the next two weeks whereas other garages aren’t.
Once home “er indoors TM” and I took the dogs down to Orlestone woods. The dogs wallowed in two separate swamps, and each ate half a dead rabbit. They never do that when I take them on my own.
Once the dogs had been bathed “er indoors TM” boiled up a very good bit of dinner which we followed with stilton and biccies; all washed down with a bottle of Sainsbury’s home-brand claret as we watched “Rocketman”. It was OK… it was actually very good. It would probably have been better if I’d known more of Elton John’s music. But I stayed awake for it, and that was something of a result.
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