With no alarm set I slept rather better. I got up at
half past seven, made toast and had my usual look at the Internet as I do. It
was much the same as it ever is. Today some crackpot from the future was
telling the world what disaster awaits us. He seemed to gloss
over how he made a time machine in a post-apocalyptic disaster area though.
And there was talk about a documentary which has
exposed a lot of serious racism and racist hate in Reform UK
politicians. Surely the only surprise here is that it is presented as news? Obviously
as a county the UK can’t support unlimited immigration. However from my own
experience of being unable to fill vacancies (not a single UK-based
applicant for many posts over many years) the UK needs some immigration.
The problem is human nature. Just because the scarf someone wears to a football
match is a different colour to someone else’s is reason enough for many to go
and inflict physical harm on someone else. As a lad in the Boys Brigade we
hated the scouts as they were scouts and not Boys Brigade. We were the eighth
Hastings company… there was also quite a bit of animosity against any of the
other Boys Brigade companies. I for one have issues with the later group at Dog
Club for the simple reason that I’m in the early group. It’s human nature to
distrust anyone who is in any way different, and we look for differences, don’t
we?.
Sadly rather than rising above our differences, Reform
UK is gaining traction from exploiting them.
I took the dogs out. We walked up and down the road
looking for my car. I eventually found it where I’d left it yesterday… right
outside the house.
We drove off. As we went the pundits on the radio were
interviewing the Scottish First Minister who was (quite frankly) talking
out of his arse. On the one hand he was adamant that he wanted Scotland to be
independent of the United Kingdom. On the other hand he was crystal clear that
he wanted Scotland to be a part of the European Union. And he was utterly
unable to see any contradiction in those two viewpoints.
We got to the woods where the idiots were out in
force. We met one chap who was hysterically bellowing at his dog every time it
moved more than two yards away from him. We met some woman with a dog the size
of a cart horse. This dog was on a lead half a mile from the nearest road and
was all but pulling the woman over. And we heard the sound of bells and shouts.
Some people attach loud bells to their dogs so they don’t lose the dogs. One
such dog had clearly got lost, and its walker was bellowing for the dog. After
ten minutes of listening to her shouting, I shouted that if she were to shut up
she’d be able to hear the dog’s bells. She shut up. As well she might. I go to
the woods to walk the dogs, for exercise, but mostly for a bit of peace and
quiet. I get so wound up by the gobby ones up there. We didn’t see any deer
today… hardly surprising really. But we did see brown leaves. In the three days
since we were last at Kings Wood autumn has suddenly arrived.
After four and a half miles or five miles (depending
on whether you asked my phone or my watch) we were back at the car. As we
drove out of the car park those presenting “Women’s Hour” were being
rather nasty about Nigella Lawson’s appearances on “Bake Off”.
Apparently shoving great lumps of cake into one’s gob isn’t ladylike, and she
should daintily nibble on half a crumb.
I turned over to my audiobook and we drove home.
I sorted a cuppa, and the phone rang. I had a
telephone appointment with the ENT chap this morning. He had the results of the
hearing tests I had a few weeks ago. I’ve got mild to moderate high frequency
hearing loss in both ears. The ENT chap said this is a symptom of getting older
(!) and is a common cause of tinnitus. He felt that all the time the
tinnitus is just a mild inconvenience then I should just suck it up. If it
becomes painful or keeps me awake then we could look at white noise generators
and specific hearing aids. But for now sucking it up is the way forward. I’ve
plenty of other health issues (nasal surgeries, carpal tunnel, arthritis,
blood pressure) that I just suck up; what’s one more? If nothing less it
will give me another malady to boast about when I next meet up with mates of my
old age… more and more my conversations with my contemporaries are just
discussions of our mutual physical infirmities.
I Munzed. I Wordled. Starting with “noisy” it
took me three more tries to end up with “dunce”. I wrote
up some CPD, and as part of that I got Microsoft Copilot to
generate a fun piccie of me at work in the blood bank. In order to personalise
it somewhat I asked it to include a poster featuring the two rules I always
tell the trainees (which it did). When I thanked Microsoft Copilot for
this picture it commented: “I have to say, the final blood bank version with
the "Two Rules. Don't balls it up. Don't kill no one" poster made me
laugh. It feels exactly like the sort of unofficial quality-management
statement that every transfusion laboratory secretly operates under, despite
hundreds of pages of SOPs saying the same thing in a much more complicated way”.
Seeing it has this level of understanding of reality
is why I always thank it for anything I ask it to do.
We had a ham roll for lunch then I went on a little
shopping mission. We’re going to have a register sheet at Dog Club and we’re
going to leave sheets on a clip board in a plastic box at the paddock. So I
went to Home Bargains to get a plastic box.
Home Bargains is always interesting. For all that there’s
talk of people having no money, Home Bargains were selling huge eight-feet-tall
inflatable Hallowe’en garden decorations and they were selling fast.
I thought there was a surprising amount of children of
school age in the shop at two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, but what do I
know?
From there I went to Dobbies and had a look at the
plants, then got a couple of mottled goldfish for the little pond.
I came home, put the bag of fish into the pond to
equilibrate, and pretended to pootle whilst Treacle watched me like a hawk. She
was waiting for the magic words. So (to keep her happy) I said it was
time to “FEED THE FISH” and she flew up the garden squealing like a
thing possessed.
I gave out the fish food to fish and dogs alike, then
made us both a cuppa. I read my Kindle for a bit… and woke up an hour later. I
had a quick Meowdoku then had a look on Google. Sadly our acers have had it, so
I need to find some sort of shrub which is relatively bomb-proof. Amazon had
several ideas, but much as I like Amazon I have to question the practicality of
having a shrub delivered.
“er indoors TM” boiled
up a decent bit of dinner which we washed down with a bottle of the red stuff
and followed up with port and cheesy biccies (which the dogs loved). As
we scoffed we watched more “Lego Masters” and then the latest episode of
“Traitors” in which the foxy one got the heave-ho.
I saw that as something of a disappointment, but then that’s
the kind of guy I am.
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