Wow – that fortnight went in a flash. And now I’m back to work. Well, riding back to work, to be precise. I’m on the train, which is usually rammed, and I have three whole carriages to myself. Very strange. It’s even running on time.
So, Christmas and New Year. Christmas was the usual carnival of over-eating and feeling very fat in return. Rich and I were both getting over colds on the day itself, and I popped cough sweets as fast as everyone else did turkey. An excellent day, though: the morning spent sitting around drinking gin and eating olives; the afternoon spent playing games and quizzes. No TV apart from the news and the Queen, looking from the smock she was wearing like she was half way through painting the Sandringham ceilings.
Boxing day, we hot-footed it home to be greeted by a miowy cat and three very excited chickens who had got a taste for being out all night. They’ve been almost uncontrollable ever since and now when we try and close their door at night they block it. Gerry is particularly adept – she put a foot on the runner the other night and actually held it back as I tried to pull it across. The night after, she bit me.
Anyhow, boxing day we were entertaining Bart, Sue and dad. We’d already cooked a lasagne as big as a bed and frozen it two days before, so baked that for lunch. Cheese and port then more games ensued and then we skipped dinner on account of our spacehopper waistlines.
By the start of this week, when everyone had gone home and things had calmed down again we were starting to crave fresh air, so we headed out to Thorndon Park where I haven’t been in a decade, most likely, but was a monthly weekend rendezvous for years as a kid. This time of year, of course, most of the leaves are off the trees, so it’s not nearly as beautiful as it is when the canopy is full and it feels like a big, dense forest.
No matter: we were there for geocaching, and the terracotta carpet we kicked through was as beautiful as anything you could hope for in winter. It was a successful outing – we found three caches, and although there was little in the way of treasure worth having, it made for a fun afternoon, and a welcome break in the cake eating.
We spent new year as we did last year – on a rug in the lounge with a bottle of champagne, a baguette, some camembert hot from the oven and the cat. Not long after midnight he started yowling that we should come to bed. By half past he was striding purposefully in and out of the room looking back over his shoulders. By 01h he was pawing at our jumpers and by 02h he had given up and flopped down on the rug on his side, no longer pulling up the edges in the search for monsters that might lurk beneath. We crept up at 02h30, leaving him where he was.
The cat wants to go to bed. Rich wants to watch Olivia Newton John.
It’s become a bit of a tradition that we should start the new year with a long walk, and so next afternoon – yesterday – we drove out to Highwood to find deer. There’s a circular route out there through the woods that we’ve walked many times before, and always seen one or two of them running through the trees. This time we hit jackpot and counted 46. We stepped out from the treeline and no more than 10 metres away the whole pack (herd / family / group / flock?) bounced across the field, almost silent as their feet sunk into the soft ground, squashing the sprouting crops into the mud.
An excellent start to the year.
And then today it was work. First day back, first day on a new season ticket, and a deserted train to boot. If things carry on like this, it could be a good year indeed.
We picked up a travel bug on Saturday, under a gravestone in a little park by St Paul’s. I already knew where the cache was hidden, as I’d dug it out before, but Rich had never seen it, and as he walks past it on his way to work every day without even knowing it, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
So today we headed out to move it on, and help it complete its mission. There’s a string of caches hidden along the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation Canal, which runs east out of Chelmsford town centre and on past Maldon to Heybridge. The first seven sit between us and the A12 on its wide, graceful diversion around the town, so we took out our bikes, dug out the GPS and printed out the six that were still open for business.
They’d been very cleverly hidden. One was a small lunchbox, but the rest were slim canisters, like elongated film containers around which the owner had wrapped camouflage tape. They’d been slid into the the ironwork supports of bridges across the river, hidden in the hinges of heavy gates, and stuck using magnets to the backs and bottoms of fences.
Only one had any treasure in it, and that was just an orange rubber fish that we left in place and supplemented with a little parachuting soldier, but it made for a good ride out through the fields along the river and down by a little knot of young horses who seemed interested in our bikes.
We still have the travel bug, though, so will have to move it on next weekend. The perfect excuse for another session of cache hunting.
We went geocaching today for the first time in ages. It’s been a hot weekend, filled with breakfasts and lunches on the patio, bike rides across town and lazy mornings spent soaking up the sun.
So it seemed only natural to head out this afternoon without any coats to look for hidden treasure. We’d picked a spot in the middle of nowhere – a village of about three houses, a phone box and a small farm that obviously does school trips. The farmer had piled up 30 tiny pink wellies on a shelf and there were four soap dispensers screwed onto an outside wall.
The clues took us to a graveyard where we hunted among the nettles and grass for the dates on the stones that would give us the final coordinates. The stash, it turned out, was half a kilometre away, and we headed out to find it across a field of peas, whose pods were gently creaking and popping in the humid air.
But as the GPS tracked our progress the sky turned black, the clouds rolled in and the rain finally broke. We ran back through the peas to the small church in the middle of the graveyard and pushed the door, running inside for shelter. It clearly hadn’t been used in years.
The floor was broken, with the wooden boards that would once have supported the long-gone pews splintered and cracked. One of the windows had been smashed, and apart from the pulpit, the only recognisable furniture was a single stool, caught in the dying rays of sunlight seeping through the window.
We spent an hour there and in the porch waiting for the rain to pass, listening to the colony of bees hanging from the tree outside the broken window, now buzzing angrily at the rain and the heat.
I wouldn’t doubt that as we sat there we were doing what others before us had done for the last three or four hundred years, and with that thought in mind it was a rather beautiful way to spend the afternoon.
I don’t think actually finding the treasure could have made it any better.
