2 March 2026 (Monday) - Reunion

Apart from a rather vivid nightmare in which we’d moved house to somewhere with no light switches I had a rather good night’s sleep.

I got up at half past seven, made toast, and my piss boiled. I try not to rant about lefty woke bollox because I’m probably quite a woke lefty myself, but my piss boiled as I read what George Takei had posted to Facebook this morning. Apparently if you are perpetually late for work because you are too bone idle to get your arse out of bed, you can just claim to have “time blindness”. And it is a real thing too.

I Munzed, Wordled from “house” through “scare” and “spine” to “slime”, then got ready for the off.

 

Leaving “er indoors ^TM” with the dogs I walked up to the train station and got a ticket to Hastings. Again the price charged at the counter bore absolutely no relation to what I’d been quoted on-line.

Getting the train was quite an adventure; I’ve not been on one for a few years. But it wasn’t long before I was in Hastings. I rummaged by a billboard near the station for geocachical reasons and found a geocache there. I then walked over the West Hill where I failed to find three others, but I redeemed myself by finding three in the Old Town. And having constructively (!) spent the morning I went down to the First In Last Out where I met up with a couple of old friends. One was over from Canada who I’d not seen since 1982. Another has been on my Facebook list for some time, but we’d not met in person since 1995.

We spent a rather good three hours catching up, remembering old days. One of us retired from programming Canadian computers nearly ten years ago, one of us is semi-retired from blood testing, and one spent years in the pharmaceutical industry and now makes (among other things) night vision goggles. All with the same start in life; all now completely different… But it was as though only a few weeks had passed.

It was so good to catch up. We really must do this sort of thing more often.

 

All too soon the clock had beaten us. We walked back through the Old Town and into Hastings. The place has changed beyond all recognition. When I lived there the Old Town was very run-down and Hastings itself had all the shops. Now the decent shops are all in the Old Town and Hastings itself is just… well… “grim” is probably the best word to describe it.

In a novel break with tradition I stayed awake all the way home…