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12 July 2022 (Tuesday) - Road Trip

The puppies had a right cob-on this morning when I wouldn’t let them upstairs. The vet-nurse had said “no stairs”, and so “no stairs” it was.

As they sulked I made toast and scoffed it as I had a little look at the Internet. It was the same as ever. Today’s bitter tirade was from some chap on one of the weather forecasting Facebook pages. This bloke has spent the last week producing scaremongering weather forecasts. Whilst it is *very* hot at the moment, his predictions are for temperatures about fifteen degrees hotter than reality. He seemed rather miffed that people would take umbrage with what he’d been posting, and couldn’t see that because his forecasts were demonstrably wrong he should come up with a different way of making forecasts.

 

I then got on with the business of the day. First of all to the tip where I chucked away all the stuff I’d loaded up yesterday. And I learned something. Whenever you book a slot at the tip you get a half-hour window. I always turn up at the start of that half-hour window as does everyone else, and the place is heaving. Today I’d got stuck in traffic and arrived ten minutes into that window to find the tip was empty with no other people unloading at all. I shall do that next time.

 

From the tip I then took my life in my hands as drove down to Hastings. With white vans not five yards from my back bumper for much of the way and oncoming cars straddling the white line up the middle of the road it wasn’t the best drive I’ve ever had. But I got to Hastings and spent a few minutes with Dad. He was well and quite chatty. He wasn’t keen about the ongoing heatwave, but then who is?

 

Pausing only briefly in Westfield for geo-reasons I then went on to Northiam and Will’s Bakery. I’ve driven past there several times; I shall stop more often.

I stopped at the pond shop in Rolvenden as well. I needed new filter medium for the pond’s filter, and I had a question. Bearing in mind that it is nearly sixteen years since we put in the pond’s liner (21 October 2006) I’ve been wondering if the thing might need replacing any time soon. The chap in the shop said it had a “lifetime guarantee” to which I remarked that it was therefore guaranteed until such time as it perished since that would be the end of its lifetime, The chap in the shop stopped and thought… and remarked that no one had made that observation before. He went on to say that the thick rubber liner should probably be good for twenty-five years. Let’s hope it will be.

 

I then drove up to Hartleylands Fishery where the first fruit of my loin and my brother have been fishing since Sunday. They have been camped out there for two days and are staying till tomorrow. They seemed pleased when I arrived with bottles of cold orange juice; their first cold drink in two days of heatwave. They were also pleased with the toasted cheese and bacon baguettes. And were rather chuffed when they saw the pizzas and meat pies I’d got for them for later.

I remarked that I’d not seen any fish photos posted on social media. There was a reason for that. Despite having been fishing for two days, neither had actually caught anything (at all). Mind you the weather hasn’t been conducive to fishing where they were. They were fishing a rather big lake which only contained eighty fish. Admittedly rather big ones, but only eighty. As I sat with them I could see quite a few of the fish basking in the sunshine. With the baits on the bottom of the pond, the fish were on the top. They’d tried using floating baits only to be then fighting a losing battle with the local ducks.

 

After an hour I came home, and as the dogs slept I got on with ironing. I watched the last episode of “Orange is the New Black”. That show only took three months to binge-watch. It was rather good. I then watched a film I’d recorded months ago. ”Beautiful Thing” was probably very avante-guard when it was released twenty-five years ago, but just seemed rather dated today. And with ironing ironed I sat on the sofa with the dogs and watched the third season of “Love, Death and Robots”.

 

“er indoors TM had been out for dinner at mid-day with work, and so not wanting dinner herself this evening she did me a plate of liver and onions. The dogs got liver too. Treacle likes liver; it was new to the puppies, but they yummed it up. They had their “cones of shame” removed to eat, but soon had them put back on when they started to scrap. Morgan settled, but Bailey wasn’t keen to quieten down.

Have you ever tried to tell a rather fractious and quarrelsome dog that only yesterday she had three serious operations and needs to rest?

 

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