28 April 2023 (Friday) - Before Another Late Shift

With the coughing and the snotting finally receding to manageable proportions I was sleeping better than I had done for a long time when the bin men woke me at silly o’clock. The bin men won’t collect bins that aren’t put onto the pavements for them, and on bin day they send an advance party to move each bin about a yard or so seemingly just to make a noise at five o’clock.

I wish they wouldn’t, but what can anyone do? Complaints about the bin men won’t be acted on. As the chap at the council said, we must all “appease the contractor”.

 

I made toast and sent out four birthday wishes. One to a munzing friend. One to a cousin. One to a real friend. And one which had me pondering. There was a chap who was such a large part of my life for many years. We would go on cycle rides and camping trips and pub crawls. Some rather decent Christmases… and about this time last year we heard (third hand) that he’d sold his house and moved to Scotland and no one has heard anything from him since.

I wonder how he’s doing.

As I perused Facebook this morning there was a post about a “Gofundme” campaign on one of the pages I follow. Someone who also follows the page needed money. Being American she had no access to any NHS-type freely available healthcare and had chosen to pay for cancer treatment rather than paying the electricity bill, but ended up not having enough money for either and found herself owing tens of thousands of dollars.

Bear that in mind when you (I) whinge about the NHS.

 

Despite the mud yesterday and the overnight rain we went back to Orlestone for a walk today. When time is at a premium it has the advantage over Kings Wood of a twenty-minute shorter driving time. Morgan seemed reluctant to go, but he seemed to enjoy himself even though the mud was as bad (if not worse) than I feared.

As we walked there was an odd incident… at just over the half-way point I could clearly hear someone whistling a cheery tune. I looked around wanting to nip any potential “dog episode” in the bud. But no matter in which direction I looked I couldn’t see anyone. Even though I could clearly hear the whistling.

And then at the end of our walk (was it connected?) not fifty yards from the car park we met two police officers tiptoeing through the mud. Morgan and Bailey ran up to them to say hello. The policewoman asked if we’d seen anything suspicious in the woods. I mentioned the strange whistling sound, and the two coppers exchanged glances. The policeman asked exactly where I’d heard the whistle, and his face was a picture when I said about half a mile away. He looked at me, looked at the policewoman, looked at the mud and repeated “half a mile?” in a rather disbelieving tone. He had no idea how big Orlestone Woods are. Our standard walk is just under two miles, and we don’t go anywhere near the southern or eastern parts of the wood except in the height of summer.

I would have thought that police would have been issued with wellies if they were going to be sent on missions into woodlands…

 

We came home and the dogs had a serious scrub. They were filthy. Especially Treacle; she really is a swamp monster.

I then had a little look at the pond. The new filter has certainly been doing good; I can clearly see the pumps on the bottom of the pond which I couldn’t two days ago. All I need now is to think about filter cleaning. That will involve a pipe long enough to go from the filter to the drain. I got out a tape measure and even using the hose I salvaged on Wednesday I’m still going to need twenty metres of the stuff.

Good old Amazon!!

I hope the stuff comes on some sort of reel.

 

We'd had a good walk earlier, and I'd had a few minutes in the garden. As I headed off to work so the rain started. With little more than tripe on the radio I turned to Ivor Biggun songs and set off to work thinking about something that “er indoors ^TM” had mentioned. Six years ago (27 April 2017) “My Boy ^TM” and I had emptied her mate's pond and shifted a *lot*  of small fish into our pond (forty-six). Bearing in mind there were quite a few fish already in the pond when those forty-six went in, there is nowhere near that amount of fish in the pond now. Where have they all gone?

 

The drive to work today was rather slow. As I crawled at a snail's pace behind a huge lorry I saw that the pub in Biddenden was up for sale. Another pub gone; I can't imagine that one re-opening.

And then there was quite the hold-up in Bethersden as three huge lorries tried to negotiate the chicane for which they were clearly far too large.

 

I got to work and as I sat in the car park scoffing a sandwich my phone rang. It was the estate agent who had just turned down an offer on Dad's house as they thought it was too low. I can't help but think that by this stage of the game, any offer is worth having. With every single viewer saying they can get bigger houses cheaper in the area, I was giving up any hope of selling it.

A little while later she phoned back to say the buyer had upped his offer, and we've accepted it. Perhaps not as much money in my back bin as I would have liked, but (in all honesty) far more than if we'd held on for a price we'd never have got.

Now we've got all the arse ache of solicitors...