After I’d been trying
to get comfortable for a couple of hours this morning I had a sudden
revelation. My ongoing back pain started about the same time that this new
mattress arrived…
I
said I didn’t like the thing.
I
got up, did the puppies, and as they snuggled with “er indoors TM”
upstairs I made toast and watched the Christmas “Detectorists” special.
It was really good.
I
then sparked up the Internet.
Our
Munzee Clan had reached our target for the monthly Clan War. That was something
of a result. Someone had walked some of my geocaches over the Christmas break
and found some which had been reported as missing. That too was a result, as I
had been looking to archive those ones. Mind you had they actually found them,
or replaced them? Don’t know, don’t care.
At
the moment it would seem I am the person with most active geocaches in Kent,
and I’ve (sadly) made the decision that if no one else can be bothered
to contribute to the hobby, then I won’t either. I shall replace any missing
ones in Kings Wood (as that is a dog walk for me), but few of the others
are really in a convenient place to replace, and I shall archive any of those
that go missing or supposedly need maintenance. After all, (as I have said
so many times before) if people going out looking for them carry a couple
of old pots and a scrap of paper in their pockets, they can do any maintenance
in less time that it takes to write me a message saying it needs doing. *If*
they could be bothered.
There
was quite the argument kicking off on Facebook this morning. Some new chap had
joined the page for old boys of my old secondary school and had voiced a
controversial opinion. There are many on that page who (for years) have
waxed loquacious about the good old days, and how school sports afternoon led
them to glory in football cricket, hockey, long-distance running and
pro-celebrity arm-wrestling at county and national level.
Someone
had dared to say that school sports were enjoyed by a small minority, and that
the teachers used to bully the rest of us to take part. I think this chap has
got a point. As the class fat lad I hated school sports with a passion. I
honestly believed that as long as the light blue shirt I wore got round the
course (which got House points), the fat lad wearing it could drop dead
immediately afterwards for all that the teachers cared.
After
a couple of years of several of us being crap at sports the teachers suddenly
realized that there were two sorts of kids in sports set five; those who wanted
to do sports but really were on the crap side, and those with no interest in
sport whatsoever. The dozen or so of us with no interest in sport were
relegated to the newly created sports set six and every week we’d go for a two
or three mile country walk with the Latin teacher…
And
I’ve been walking for miles through the country ever since…
And
then my new watch started vibrating. The cheeky thing told me that I’d not done
any steps at all and it was time to get moving.
The
thing probably had a point.
I
moved round the garden harvesting a bumper crop of dog dung. It never fails to
amaze me just how much dung three rather small dogs create. And with dung
harvested I emptied all the nonsense from the back seat of the car, loaded up “er
indoors TM” and the dogs, collected “My Boy TM”,
Cheryl and Ro-Ro and we all went up to Kings Wood for a little walk.
I’d
never seen the car park so full; we got the last parking space. There were
loads of normal people swarming about, but once we were five minutes from the
car park we had the woods to ourselves and had a good walk. After a minute or
so of starting, my new watch asked if it might record the exercise activity. I
gave it my regal permission to do so, and after we did a rather shorter walk
that usual it told me we’d walked a shade under four kilometres and I’d shifted
just over a thousand calories.
We
came home for a quick wash-up, and with the dogs snoring we went round to “My
Boy TM”, Cheryl (and Ro-Ro) for a rather good afternoon
of eating far too much and playing “Cluedo”. I got to be Professor Plums,
but despite my assertion that Colonel Mustard had done it in the lavatory with
Miss Pink, I lost every game. I don’t pretend to be any good at “Cluedo”
but there’s a lot worse ways of spending an afternoon and evening. Even if my
new watch did tell me to get up and start moving. Twice.
I’ve
eaten far too much and have a belly ache now… And today was the puppies first
birthday.
