I had a reasonable night's sleep - settled dogs help. But I
woke with the same niggling toothache that I had when I went to bed last night.
I made toast, turned on the telly and the SkyPlus box
refused to do anything. It does that periodically. Nothing that turning it all
off at the mains, counting to twenty and turning back on again can't cure, but
a pain in the glass (!) nonetheless. Whilst checking that it had all
come back on-line I saw that “Star Trek: Lower Decks” was now available
on Paramount Plus. When I last looked it was only on Amazon Prime, and I had to
pay extra for each episode. So I watched an episode of "Lower Decks"
on Paramount Plus and reminded myself that despite being a cartoon, it was
rather good. Loads of references to what had gone before if you paid attention.
I quickly checked the Internet - a friend in America had
seen a documentary on Dover's Western Heights. I sent through some of the photos from when
we'd been exploring there twelve years ago, then set off to work.
As I drove the pundits on the radio were talking about how
the Prime Minister is looking to ease up on some of
the green legislation he had planned.
There were a lot of people looking to lambast him about
this. Not least of which the people who make cars who are spending millions of
pounds tooling up to make electric cars. I feel sorry for them having
potentially spent a fortune needlessly, but...
The trouble here is that the planning for electric cars is
all arse-about-face. As a nation we need the infrastructure to charge electric
cars in place *before* everyone is forced to get one. There's no point
in people getting a leccie car if you can't charge it anywhere (like I can't).
In any case the whole "UK going green thing"
is rather pissing in the wind all the time the USA and China carry on as they are, isn't it?
I got to work and did my thing. I phoned my dentist to see
if I could get an appointment for my aching fang; I couldn't.
When I came home I phoned them to see if they had a cancellation.
There was no reply so I went down the road to talk to them. According to their
website they were open until seven o’clock. According to the sheet of paper
blu-tack-ed to their door they closed at five o’clock.
I’m not impressed.
With the dogs settled we went out for the evening for a
little get-together. Thirty and a half years ago I answered a letter in the
TV Zone sci-fi magazine asking if there were any Star Trek fans in Kent. It
turned out there were three. The chap who’d asked the question (who lived
thirty miles away in Ramsgate) and two of us in Ashford. Shortly after that
a little Ashford-based Star Trek fan club started up. With twelve of us at the
first ever meeting (in May 1993 in my living room) over the years the numbers
grew. People came and went. Eventually we called an end when lockdowns put paid
to pretty much everything three years ago. But over the years we had such fun.
Star Trek conventions and role-playing games and booze-ups. Weddings and
christenings. We even had a couple of funerals along the way. Over thirty years
we lost touch with some people, and what with people having moved away and
illness and one thing and another we couldn’t all get together tonight. But
some of us did.
We will *not* leave it so long before out next get-together…
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