In a novel break with tradition I was having a rather good
night’s sleep right up to the point where Bailey woke me when she had a
nightmare. The poor little thing was having serious night terrors. Eventually
she settled but I didn’t really get back to sleep after that.
I made toast and had a look at the Internet. Oh, there was
gloating and consternation on the local Facebook pages. The election results
are in and it has been a landslide victory for Reform UK… Or has it? For all
that they came out on top in elections all over the country, did they actually
win? Look at the result of our local
election. The given figures are rather misleading. The winning
candidate *didn’t* win with forty-two per cent of the vote. He won with
the support of forty-two per cent of those who could be arsed to go and vote.
When you consider those who couldn’t be bothered he actually won with fourteen
per cent of the vote.
To be fair, this isn’t news. I ranted much the same
piss-poor turnout at the last county council election four years ago.
I must admit that the chap who won locally wasn’t my
choice… mainly because he was rather vague about his policies (i.e. didn’t
actually say anything about having any). As he said “A promise made is a
promise kept” and by promising nothing he was not setting himself up to
fail, was he? Mind you it is easy to be sceptical, isn’t it? I shall give him a
week or so to settle in and then see where he stands on getting the river Stour
dredged.
And as for the new Reform UK county council… who knows.
Presumably they will put a stop to the “Operation Brock” stupidity. I
shall bide my time and see what they do before condemning them out of hand.
However one thing has occurred to me. A new county council
will presumably have its own new agenda and presumably this will come with a
budget… one which was set when the council tax bills came through a couple of
months ago. Will council tax bills be changing any time soon?
The plan for today had vaguely been a trip to London for
the big geo-event that was taking place there. But it was only a vague plan,
and I soon knocked that on the head when I realized that it would have been a
long way to go and a lot of expense. Back in the day I would have organized a
mass outing to something like that and a dozen or so of us would have gone
along. These days… sadly I really can’t be bothered.
And I must admit to a slight sense of being a tad miffed
that I spent so much time on Monday afternoon hurriedly re-writing Wherigos for
the organisers of today’s event only to have them not get back to me at all.
Instead we went to Dog Club where we had a great time
watching the dogs charging round with all of their friends. It is rather
difficult to keep track of attendance as the dogs won’t sit still, but I’m sure
I counted twenty dogs.
From Dog Club we drove up the motorway. Steve was on the
radio; I got the mystery year (1976) and we drove up to Boxley where we
met Karl and Tracey. They were doing maintenance on a series of their geocaches
and we went along for the walk. Geo-maintenance is a sad necessary evil of
geocaching. More and more it is becoming painfully apparent that there are two
sorts of people who go geocaching… those who actually hide the things and those
who don’t. Those who don’t find it easier to press the “Needs Maintenance”
button rather than to sort out broken or missing film pots, and those who hide
them spend their time replacing the missing or broken caches up to the point
where they say “sod it”. And then those who don’t hide the things get
all stressy when they have to drive over an hour to find any new caches because
no one can be bothered to put out any new caches.
But this is a rant I’ve done to death.
In any case we had a rather good walk, and a very good
three hours in the pub. It was somewhat ironic that after the third pint and
just before the second gin & tonic a “Found It” log came in on one
of the supposedly missing caches that we were about to replace.
I took a few photos whilst we
were out, and slept most of the way home.
Once home we scoffed omelets and watched this evening’s episodes
of “Doctor Who” which was rather good. This entire season has been
rather good.
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