25 February 2022 (Friday) - Watching The Telly

I woke feeling rather unsettled and restless for absolutely no reason that I could work out. I made toast, turned on my lap-top and peered into the Internet as I do most mornings. The situation in Ukraine is bad for the people who live there, and in a typical sign of our times everyone and his wife were expressing solidarity wit the underdogs by sticking a Ukrainian flag on their Facebook profile picture.

As the situation in the Ukraine continues to deteriorate I can’t help but find myself wondering about what’s been going on in the world in the last thirty-odd years. I can remember the failed coup in the old USSR in 1991. I was at an Open University summer school at the time, and we thought it was a resounding victory for the West. The Cold War had been going on for as long as I could remember. I’d spent nearly thirty years in the shadow of nuclear Armageddon, and the Russian threat was finally receding. From that failed coup the USSR started to falter, and eventually fell apart… and then what happened in the meantime?

Whilst we in the west learned to become offended at pretty much everything and anything and started to re-write history to expunge anything that is not politically correct,  and to exponentially increase the amount of genders that there may or may not be, the Russians licked their wounds and re-built their army. And here we are again facing the threat that the world faced when I was a lad, sadly this time having nothing with which to actually face it.

The Russian invasion of the Ukraine will continue. And then where will he invade next? Who is going to stop him? With total control of much of Europe’s gas supply, and facing a generation whose greatest asset is to take offence, what is to stop Mr Putin achieving that which his predecessors dreamt about.

There was also talk about some trivia on an episode of “Star Trek: Discovery” that was on telly last night. Mind you when I say “on telly” I mean “on some obscure pay-per-view channel that very few people are aware of, let alone pay for”. Back in the day everyone loved “Star Trek”; these days the makers sell the show to the channel that bids the highest, and hardly anyone sees it anymore.

 

I had a look at my emails. NHS Jobs has randomly decided to start sending me notifications of vacancies that might interest me. It was only when they arrived today that I realised I’d not had any of those for years. It would seem that there are still vacancies for blood testers all over the place; if anything the shortage has increased.

I also had a suggestion from LinkedIn that I might like to congratulate someone I’d never heard of on her promotion to “Senior Bimbo” or some other meaningless title. I have no idea who this person is… much like most of the people on my LinkedIn contact list.

 

Not wanting to take the dogs out during the rush hour I had a go on “Sweardle” and got it right on the third attempt with “turd” but struggled with “Lewdle” where the answer was “thicc”. “Sweardle” is a bit of fun, but I am convinced that “Lewdle” makes its own words up.

 

Seeing a bright day outside I got the dogs into the car and we set off. I listened to thirty seconds of “Desert Islands Discs” in which some mad woman was going on about never turning up the opportunity to commune with goats (!) before turning to my wonderful choice in music. We drove past the petrol station in Brookfield Road where the queue for panic-buying of petrol was starting to build up, and we drove on up to Kings Wood where we had a very good walk. From the car park we followed the paths until we were a mile and a half from the car as the crow flies (according to my OS app), and then followed other paths back. Again we saw quite a few dogs on leads over a mile from the nearest roads. Do they *all* have recall problems? My two didn’t react at any of the other dogs; I was so pleased with them.

We also saw quite a few birds of prey too. If the predators are out in force, then the prey must be doing well too.

We came home past Sainsburys where the panic-buying queue wasn’t as long as it has been in the past.

 

With walk walked some of us had a quick bath, and then I ran round the garden with the lawn mower. The ground was a tad soft, but the lawn needed mowing. And by then it was mid-day. I popped up the road for a sandwich but seeing the kebab shop open I came back with meat and chips to share with the dogs.

I had intended to carry on in the garden but finding myself underneath a pile of sleeping dogs I just watched the telly for a bit. “The Gentleman” was a rather good film about gangsters which passed a couple of hours as the kebab meat digested, then after a little sleep I hung out washing and watched “Trailer Park Boys” which is always fun.

I watched quite a lot of “Trailer Park Boys” today…

24 February 2022 (Thursday) - It Rained. A Lot

I didn’t have the best of nights. I woke in a cold sweat after only a couple of hours sleep having had a nightmare in which I’d had an owl telling me I’d been accepted into Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There was an apology that it was fifty years late, but Dumbledore himself said I’d got “sod all else to do so you might as well”. Having got to the school I soon found that I’d been invited under false pretences; pretty much all of the students were dead following a mishap with a “f*ck the f*ckers up” jinx and Dumbledore was looking for a stooge to take the blame. And that was when I woke in a cold sweat. Sometimes I wonder about what goes on inside my head.

I went to the loo to calm my nerves and came back to find no space in the bed at all as the dogs had made themselves comfortable.

“er indoors ^TM”’s alarm woke me shortly after seven, and with her showing no signs of moving I went back to sleep and was blissfully snoozing when the dogs suddenly had a “Red Alert” for absolutely no reason whatsoever at eight o’clock.

 

I made toast and scoffed it while yet another negative COVID test incubated, and as I had a look on-line. The Internet was still there, but not really much of note was going on in people’s lives. Everyone was up in arms about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but what can the likes of us do about it?

As I rummaged in a rather dull Internet I listened to the sound of the rain against the window. This rain had been forecast; it was a shame that the forecast couldn’t have been wrong today. But what could we do? As always we had two choices. We could sulk, or we could get on with it. The dogs were asking to go out; Pogo was trying to herd me to the front door, so I put on a coat and thought we’d have a walk round the block. But seeing the rain had stopped I thought we’d have a proper walk.

We drove up to Kings Wood and set off on our walk. I slipped in the mud to begin with, but the mud wasn’t *that* bad. It wasn’t that long before we came to a fallen tree. I took a photo of it; I took a few photos as we walked. I had a plan to create an album of photos of the damage caused by last week’s storm. Bearing in mind the carnage of the great storm of 1987, there was disappointingly little damage to be photographed today.

When we got about as far from the car as we were planning to get so the sky darkened and the heavens opened and we got soaked. So much for the rain stopping. We squelched our way back to the car and got home to find glorious sunshine.

 

As the washing machine scrubbed the mud out of the trousers I’d walked earlier I listened to that idiot of a Prime Minister we’ve got who was addressing the nation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He comes across so well in these speeches, and then goes on to embarrass himself very soon after, doesn’t he? He was banging on about the sanctions that the UK is going to impose on Russia… doesn’t he realise how much the price of the gas we import from Russia has gone up? Sixty quid a month for me alone! Whilst I do feel for the Ukrainians whose country is fast going back to being a Russian satellite, what *can* the UK realistically do? Until such time as the UK is not utterly dependent on Russian gas, the sad fact is the UK needs to think very carefully before pissing on its own chips.

 

I got out the ironing board, and tried to sort the laundry as Pogo made himself a little nest out of what I was trying to iron. As I fought with ironing and Pogo I watched an afternoon’s worth of “Four In A Bed” which started off with the first contestant crying about how lovely everyone had been to her, and ended up with her crying because everyone hated her. I do like that show (as I have said before), but watching it as it is broadcast is a silly thing to do. I could probably have saved nearly an hour by pre-recording and fast-forwarding through the adverts.

Also as I fought with ironing and Pogo I kept glancing out of the window at the weather which was alternating from glorious sunshine to (not forecast) torrential rain and back again with regularity.

 

With ironing ironed and telly watched I had a look at the monthly accounts. They are a lot better than they might be, but nowhere near as good as I wish they were. I just want to have far too much money. Is that so much to ask?

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a very good bit of dinner which we scoffed as she yelled abuse at the telly as it showed us the last episode of “Celebrity Hunted”. I won’t give the game away, but I will say that two of the contestants were incredibly unlucky.

As we scoffed it we necked perhaps one of the best bottles of white wine that I have ever had. At less than four quid a bottle it gives the lie to the pretentious, doesn’t it?

23 February 2022 (Wednesday) - During the Car Service

As I scoffed my toast I saw I had a message about a Wherigo I’d put out in Canterbury which had been giving people some trouble. I created the thing seven years ago and had thought about archiving it when I stopped working in Canterbury five years ago, but it seems to have been OK up until now. The software seems to have developed a bug in which it throws up random QR codes where it shouldn’t. I wish it wouldn’t.

And the nice people at Credit Karma had emailed me to say my credit score has gone up, They’d suggested I ask the bank to increase the limit on my credit card so over two weeks ago I did just that, and now they have increased my score by eleven points, which has taken it from “Good” to “Excellent”. I suppose this is worth having? After a little farting around on-line I found that the people who make these scores won’t say what the national average credit score is for the UK, but they did say that area with the highest score is Kingston-upon-Thames which has an average score of five hundred and forty-seven. I suppose you’d expect no less from Kingston-upon-Thames, would you?

And there was a lot of talk on Facebook on the work-related groups in which an American blood tester was gloating that she’d just had a cut-price birth. Apparently because yesterday was the midwife’s birthday (or something) the cost of the medical expenses that went with the birth was only thousands of dollars, rather than tens of thousands of dollars. There was then quite the debate (squabble) among the American blood testers about the going rate for a birth, and the consensus of opinion was to shop around before deciding to go into labour. Doesn’t this make you realise just how wonderful the NHS is…

 

I went down the road to the dentist. As always I’d had no end of messages from them about COVID precautions and the need for face coverings, and as always not one of the receptionists had a face mask over their noses as well as their mouths.

There was minor panic there as their computer system had crashed, but I got to see the hygienist right away as hygienists apparently don’t need computers. She had a rummaging in my gob, told me it was mostly OK, and said to come back in six months. In the time it took her to do that, the computers had been fixed, so the dentist could see me. I’m not saying he didn’t do a thorough job, but I was in and out in less than two minutes.

 

I collected the dogs and drove out to the Skoda garage. The nice people in the garage seemed rather taken with the dogs, and they suggested that seeing how my car had no service history, maybe a full service might be a good idea. I left the car with them; they said to give it a couple of hours.

I had a plan to put out a Church Micro geocache at Sevington, then walk out to Mersham and back. We got to Sevington church where we met with something of a disaster. The footpath I intended to follow has been diverted seeing how the inland border facility has been built across it. So rather than following the old footpath, we explored the new ones. Bearing in mind it is February that was probably a better plan as the new paths are all on hard standing. From the church we followed a loop round the inland border facility up to the new(ish) green footpath over the motorway, and then walked up past the hospital, over the motorway again and down through Boys Hall back to the garage. Thirty seconds to type, two and a half hours to walk. I took a few photos as we walked; apart from Treacle going rogue and picking a fight with a swan it was a good walk.

 

I got back to the garage with something of a sense of dread. What would they have found on the service? Surprisingly little, really. There were a couple of advisories… I shall get those done in the next month or so. And we got out having spent about two hundred quid less than I had been expecting. And whilst they hadn’t given the car a full valeting, someone had scraped out a lot of the mud which was something of a result.

 

We came home and it wasn’t long before the dogs were both snoring after their exertions. There was no end of stuff I should have got on with, but there is something strangely satisfying about having a dog sleeping on you, and the rules are that you cannot disturb a sleeping dog, so I watched two series of “Trailer Park Boys”.

I stopped Trailer Park Boys” to nip to the loo, and when I came on “Married At First Sight: Australia” was on, and I found myself captivated by it. The premise is that total strangers get married and then… well, from what I could see they then immediately regretted having been so stupid.

I found myself thinking of someone who was once a good friend who I haven’t seen for years. This someone has spent the last twenty-odd years throwing himself head-first into one disastrous relationship after another. Having moved in with an utterly unsuitable partner in less than a week, he then had months (if not years) to regret the decision… only to go and do it again. I’ve not seen him for some time as the last-but-one disaster forbade him from associating with any of “his geek mates” of which I am apparently one. 

“er indoors ^TM” came home with a ton of KFC. That was good. If “er indoors ^TM” were to croak I certainly wouldn’t be on a “Married At First Sight” show; I’d want to know I was setting up shop with someone who would feed me.