If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

No kettle this morning. It was broken, presumably by some kind of power surge, as the orange-jacketed workmen were out and up the poles as we woke up, fixing the damage caused by yesterday’s crash.

Rich tried to switch it on, but all it did was spark and buzz, so he made tea in a saucepan, and when we’d drunk that we headed round to mum’s for breakfast.

We had planned to spend the day geocaching, so picked out two caches we thought looked fun and, after I’d written a short eulogy for a funeral on Tuesday, headed out in the car with the GPS. Thirty minutes later we were in the wilds of Essex.

Essex often gets maligned as an ugly, spoiled county, but only by those who don’t really know it. South of the A13, or along the train line out of London and up towards Suffolk isn’t really all that nice, but in between, and further north, you have some of the nicest countryside you could ever hope to find.

And so it was through this that we found ourselves walking, striding through fields of bright yellow rape to a small church with a battered graveyard, pitted by rabbit holes out of which scurried a small band of rats. We picked up eight further clues there, being careful to keep away from the rodents, and found the treasure, after a couple of hours hiking, without too much trouble.

There wasn’t much for the taking, so after looking through the stash we hid it again where we’d found it, and followed the GPS back towards the car, passing an old Ford Anglia, abandoned among the trees. It had been there a very long time - perhaps 20 years or more - and had been so subsumed by the trees that there was no way it would ever be removed. One tree had even grown up between the front bumper and radiator, and was pushing them apart and, as Rich said, it was this, not the stash, that was the real treasure.

We took a wrong turn on the walk back to the car and found ourselves crossing a farm as the farmer walked out of his barn. He had a trap by the side of the road, inside of which a large magpie was dancing in wild frustration, hopping up onto a small perch, then down again onto the ground, back up onto the perch and then down again on the other side. It went on the whole time we were there.

I asked him if it was a pet.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s a trap.’

‘Why do you trap them?’

‘Because they kill the birds.’

There was some logic in there somewhere, I’m sure, but as the words floated out between his sepia-stained teeth I was having trouble seeing it. This bird would be killed to stop another from dying. Somehow I couldn’t see how that would benefit the bird population overall, but as we were trespassing on his land I didn’t want to argue, so instead agreed that it was a Very Good Idea Indeed, and asked for directions back to the car, blaming our minor miscalculation (ie following the footpath signs on the fence posts) on a multi-billion dollar network of defence satellites.

‘Bah, those things never work,’ he said, immediately discounting several thousand man-years of expensive research, before pointing us past his battered pick-up towards the road.

We eventually got home just before mum, who had spent the day visiting her new grand child, and was full of stories of tiny fingers and poky toes. We promised we’d visit on Monday.

Still no power. The house alarm doesn’t like it; it spent much of the night bleeping in pain.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.