30 January 2025 (Thursday) - Esher Common

I had another terrible night’s sleep. I had an early night last night and woke after a couple of hours. I then lay half awake and half asleep until half past four when I gave up trying to sleep and got up.
I made toast, watched more “Poldark” in which Master Drake was besotted with Mistress Morwenna. As happens to the best of us.
 
And then I set off. First of all to the petrol station where the miserable old bat on the till was remarkably cheerful for once.
And then up the motorway. As I drove there was all sorts of talk on the radio about how water bills are going through the roof. Having sold off the water companies (years ago) the amazing revelation has been made that rather than giving it all to shareholders as dividends, the money people have paid as water bills should have been spent on maintaining and replacing the existing infrastructure. And so after years of neglect the water companies are leaping into action. And having leapt they’ve all realized they pissed away all their income.
And tere was all sorts of talk about the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and also an interview with her. She made some speech yesterday about how she plans to make Britain great again; such a shame that no one really seemed to believe her.
 
The traffic wasn’t that bad today. Google had told me that it would take between an hour and a half and two and a half hours to get to Esher Common; it took two hours.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote  “Having done some serious brain-straining with Gordon over the last week we’ve got the final locations of a series of geocaches… but they are all a long way up various trees. To get at them we need ten-metre poles”. Geocaches rarely go up trees, so chasing after these ones was a must-do.
Equipped with the co-ordinates of the trees up which these geocaches were put, and with poles to get at them, I met up with Gordon and Ralph and we had a very good wander round Esher Common. Despite being up trees, the geocaches we were hunting weren’t as obvious as you might think. I had suggested waiting until the mud had dried; Gordon had pointed out that by then the leaves would be out. I struggled to see the caches on bare trees; with leaves the caches would have been all but invisible. And for all that reaching ten metres up a tree to get a cache down was tricky, putting them back took some doing.
 
Despite it being a rather cold day, the sun shone and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky all day. And I caught the sun too. I took a few photos as we walked about today. We had a good day covering…  well… Gordon’s step count was fourteen thousand; mine was twenty thousand. And my GPS said we’d done nearly eight miles whereas Ralph’s said just over six.
 
I got home about twelve hours after I’d set off. “er indoors TM boiled up lemon meringue pie for dinner. Maybe not as “diet dinner” as it might be, but to keep the calories down that was all we had.
And we started watching “Celebrity Hunted”. A shame I’ve never heard of any of these so-called celebrities.

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