20 February 2023 (Monday) - Bluewater

I slept for nine hours last night, and was rather aching when I woke. Leaving “er indoors TM and the dogs asleep I got up and made toast and had a little look at the Internet. I had yet another dubious friend request, and added it to the album. This one was ostensibly from a young lady who claimed to have been born in London but who has since emigrated to the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea where she has cultivated a rather impressive chest. She’d sent me a photo of it. I must admit that had I such an epic pair I too would brandish it with such abandon.
But then again, morally I am somewhat lax.
I also found myself faced with adverts for tropical fish shops from ridiculously far away. Just recently I’ve found I’ve had amazing service from the branches of Maidenhead Aquatics in the local Dobbies and in Notcutts garden centre in Maidstone. I shall stick with them.

We got ourselves ready to go out and settled the pups, and just as we were about to walk out the door so my phone pinged. A new geocache had gone live which was about fifty yards off of our planned route. So we set off and took a fifty yards diversion, and within a minute had the new geocache in our hands. First ones to find it too; it was only a shame that in my hurry I managed to fill my hand with splinters and thorns.
We then drove out to Charing where “er indoors TM collected a bargain she’d got from Facebook Marketplace, and from there went on to Bluewater.

On arrival we had a little wander around; as we saw what was what and what was where we did a geocaching Adventure Lab cache. Whilst it made us notice all sorts of things we otherwise would have walked straight past, we rather struggled with finding the actual locations as the GPS really didn’t want to work indoors.
My plan was the Lego shop… we soon found it and had a good look. Having had a good nosey at absolutely everything in the shop I got a job lot of bits and pieces, and custom-made myself three pirate(ish) minifigs for my Lego pirate ship. I also pointed a set out to “er indoors TM which would make a good pressie for me.

By then we were hungry so we decided that a spot of lunch would be a good thing. And you can’t go wrong with a cheeky Nando… or so I thought. To be honest the service was excellent. The food was brought out with a minimum of waiting around, and it was *really* good. However all of that was let down by the background music; mind you “background music” wouldn’t have been a bad thing. What Nando had was a frankly awful repetitive chanting caterwaul played at deafening level. I suspect it was the dreadful background noise which made the small child (three tables away) scream constantly the entire time we were there.
The resulting headache lasted all afternoon.

We came home, woke the dogs and walked them round the co-op field practicing whistle training. As we walked round the field I couldn’t help but look at the trees which have been planted and have ruined the fied. Last year the council announced that they were going to plant over a hundred and thirty thousand  trees as part of the “plant a tree for the jubilee” initiative. I can’t help but feel that it would have been better to have had a “plant a tree and look after it” initiative rather than a “plant a tree, forget all about it, let it die and get overgrown with brambles” initiative which is what would seem to have happened

While we were in Bluewater I’d got us some Whitby buns. We had them with a cuppa after our walk as we watched episodes of “Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins”, We spent half the time in frank amazement at the physical tasks faced by the contestants, and the other half of the time wondering just who these so-called celebrities were.

Over a light tea of pizza we watched some of the episodes of “Hancock’s Half Hour” that UK Gold has recently restored. I know some might regard me as a heretic for saying so, but Tony Hancock is up there with Woody Allen and Lenny Henry in that I honestly believe the only reason that they are famous comedians is because everyone thinks that everyone else thinks they are hilarious, and no one wants to admit the truth.

With “er indoors TM off bowling I made myself comfortable om the sofa underneath a pile of dogs and watched a couple of episodes of “Downton Abbey”. Ethel is in disgrace having got tubbed off of Major Bryant. Things were very different a hundred years ago…

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