I slept like a log last night. The road trip to the
Midlands, Nepalese curry, family party and late shift over a very busy weekend
had taken its toll.
I made toast and (being back to the usual routine)
had a look at the Internet. Someone with whom I went to college many years ago
was posting climate change denial propaganda. That winds me up. Climate change
is real – you can see it happening. Where there used to be cod in the English
Channel there’s now dolphins
and tuna. When did we last have enough snow for a sledge? When
did we last have a proper summer like we had when I was a lad when every day *wasn’t*
ridiculously hot?
And I found out that the world is ending in a couple of months.
One lives and learns.
And (for once) I saw the sort of thing that I
have Facebook for. A friend had been to Finland to take part in the Nordic Walking World Championship.
That’s what I want to see as I scoff my toast.
I Munzed, Wordled and went to wake “er
indoors TM” and the dogs. If I have
a lie-in she has an alarm set. If I don’t, she doesn’t either.
I took the dogs up to the woods. Sadly it is now
foraging season. For the next few weeks all of the thickets within a quarter of
a mile will be heaving with all sorts of people desperately seeking chestnuts
and mushrooms and whatever it is that people forage for. What none of them realise is that by this
afternoon everything forage-able would have been foraged, but that won’t stop
them. If any of them would walk for more than five minutes they would find an
entire forest full of stuff worth having, but hardly anyone seems to forage out
of sight of the car park.
If nothing else it gives the dogs something to bark
at.
We had a good walk. We did our usual circuit. We
didn’t see any deer, but something big was crashing about at the far end of the
woods, and we chased a few squirrels.
We came home. I made us both a cuppa and we had one of
the cakes that “er indoors TM” had
made, and then I had a look in the garden. There was a load of soil round the
bottom of one of the planters and the conifer pot. That mess wasn’t there yesterday.
I had hoped the conifer pot had rusted through. I hoped in vain. A rat had
chewed its way into the back of the planter. I emptied it all out and tided up.
As I did so the back of the planter fell apart. I shall fix that another time.
I put shirts in to wash. I harvested dog turds. And
seeing the lawn was long enough to hide the turds I ran round with the lawn
mower. And whilst I was at it I hacked back more of the brambles coming over
the fence from not-so-nice-next-door. As I hacked I saw she’d had a go
at the brambles on her side, so that has got to be a result. Hint taken,
perhaps?
No day off work is complete without ironing. And with
ironing done I tried to quietly sneak outside, but it was “that time”
and I was being watched like a pork (to coin a phrase). So I made the
announcement “I’M GOING TO FEED THE FISH” and the dogs flew to the pond,
with Treacle squealing in excitement.
I then carried on solving geo-puzzles and I had a
message. The Dog Club squabble seems to be over for now, and the later group
have asked if we’d like to hang on later this weekend as they’ve got a
photographer coming. It’s a kind thought but to my mind the days of a
professional photographer are numbered. Trying to get a dog to pose takes some
doing, and I can’t help but think that I get every bit as good a photo off of
the camera on my phone as from a fancy camera. I’m not keen on shelling out a
tenner (per dog) for photos of my three which I can get buckshee.
By late afternoon the undercrackers were washed and
dried (never a dull moment!). I put another load of washing in to scrub
and “er
indoors TM” boiled up pizza and
chips then went bowling.
I settled down and watched the last episode of “Upstairs
Downstairs”. What can I watch next?
And in closing, today marks forty-five years since I
first started work in blood testing. Let’s just say that I’ve been in my
current place of work for nine and a half years and they’ve been the happiest
nine and a half years of my working life. Being happy in your work is important
– for a *very* long time I wasn’t.
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