29 January 2026 (Thursday) - A Longer Walk

I slept well; as I often do when there’s no alarm set and the dogs are settled. I got up at eight o’clock, made toast and peered into the Internet.

This morning my Facebook feed was full of adverts for wine companies. All of them operating under the same premise – buy six bottles of wine from them for about thirty quid (bargain!)… and then they send you six more bottles every two months for a hundred and twenty quid. I’d rather buy a bottle from Sainsburys when I want one.

And I saw there’s a Taco Bell coming to Ashford.  There used to be one in Folkestone. I quite liked it; shame that hardly anyone used the place.

I Munzed, Wordled from “house” to “flaky” in four moves, and seeing it wasn’t raining I got ready for the off.

 

I drove the dogs up to the woods. As I drove “In Our Time” was on the radio. It’s a show that can be really interesting or incredibly dull. Today’s was about the Roman circuses which featured gladiators fighting wild animals and each other… or so we think. It turns out that there’s very little actual evidence of what Roman circuses were all about. Take for example the thumbs-up or thumbs-down for whether or not the loser gets killed. There’s no evidence at all that this was ever a thing. I can remember being told this at school when I did Latin O-level. Pretty much everything we think we know about gladiators was made up by Hollywood for their films.

 

We got to the woods, and took a different walk to our usual one. As we walked we met no end of noisy normal people, and our friends Amie and Willow. I didn’t recognise them; I’m hopeless at recognising people.

Usually we walk a shade over four miles; we covered six today.

 

We came home for a bath. When we got into the car all three dogs were filthy. When we got home the girls had quite clearly cleaned themselves a bit. Morgan hadn’t. And with dogs bathed I made a cuppa for “er indoors ^TM” and me, and then spent a couple of hours marking more trainees’ work. Sickle cell, malaria, morphology…

 

The afternoon was spent (as it so often is) watching episodes of “Four In A Bed” in which one stuck-up toffee-nosed old biddy found fault after fault with everyone else’s B&Bs, but needed the other contestant to help her make her breakfasts, and her place was utterly filthy because (as she openly admitted) she wasn’t a cleaner.

I sometimes wonder if these people are actually actors.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up bangers and mash which we scoffed whilst watching this week’s episode of “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” which was rather good. I do hope this show survives the serious attacks being made on in on-line by the supposed fans.