6 October 2012 (Saturday) - Now then, now then...

I woke this morning raring to go, and checked the time. 3.20am. I then lay awake for a couple of hours, finally dozing off just before my alarm went off. I then spent an annoying few minutes fighting with the alarm on my phone. Although I set it whenever I need to be up promptly, I so am so rarely woken by the thing that when it does get to make a noise I really struggle to be able to turn it off. I fought with it for what seemed like an age at 6.30am this morning; probably waking half the street whilst I was at it.
A swift bit of brekkie: over brekkie I saw that the geocache I set up yesterday still hadn't been found. There's a chap who lives locally who prides himself on finding the things as soon as he can after publication: sometimes finding them within fifteen minutes of their going live. This one went unfound for over twelve hours until this same chap found it this morning. He sent me a nice little email thanking me for my efforts, and said that last night's rain put him off.

As I drove to work I listened to the radio with a sense of amazement. Abu Hamza the allegedly hate-mongering cleric has finally been deported to face charges in America. I don't know what he's done, or supposed to have done. And at this stage in time I doubt if anyone ever will get to the truth. It's apparently taken about seven years to bring this bloke to court, and so how can any of the witnesses at the trial have a clear memory of what happened (or was alleged to have happened) so long ago.
Similarly now that he's safely dead there would seem to be a queue of people lining up to make allegations against the late Jimmy Saville. He's alleged to have had his wicked way with several naive young ladies over the years. One such was interviewed on the radio this morning. Perhaps I'm the naive one here, but what do these people hope to achieve? Maybe he was innocent? Maybe he was actually the worst kiddy-fiddler of his generation? Personally I neither accuse nor defend him; I simply don't know anything about the case. But (just like Abu Hamza), from this remove in history it's a safe bet that he won't get a fair trial.
 
And the weather wound me up too. I set of to work in the rain; I don't mind going to work in the rain; I know I'm not missing anything. But as the day went on so the weather brightened up. I checked the weather forecast to see what the weather might be like on my next day off. The BBC has a frankly amazing weather forecasting web site. When I checked it the forecast for Monday was white cloud. But when I went into the detailed forecast for Monday it was predicting rain of varying severity all day long.
 
There was a get-together today for anyone who goes geocaching in Kent. Lisa went along and had asked me to go along too. It was as well that I was at work today. I tend to stand for elected positions on things such as that, and having seen what's happening on the Kent geocaching Facebook page I'm not sure I want to get too involved on a formal basis. Most hobbies have insider squabbles and internal politics. I have had too many arguments about kite flying and snake keeping in the past. One of the things I love about the astro club is that it doesn't have this aspect to it.
The Kent geocaching community seems to be currently staging a war against some bunch operating from the north Kent coast who have been accused of all sorts of malpractices against small plastic boxes hidden in clandestine locations. Emails and letters are flying about between the protagonists and the international organisers of geocaching. I don't want to get involved with either side, even though I've even had a minor run-in myself with this lot. They accused me of falsifying my claim that I'd found a particular cache; their reasoning being that if they couldn't find it then nobody could, and so anyone who did claim to have found it was demonstrably lying.
Geocaching is a silly enough hobby as it is. Does it really need to be squabbled about?
As is always the case the important stuff is ignored. Caches in Folkestone have been found contaminated with drugs, and no one in the establishment is saying anything.
 
I did my bit at work, and came home and watched "Auf Wedhersehn Pet" DVDs for an hour or so. I would have liked to have gone to tonight's film night with everyone else, but by the time I'd got back to Ashford it was gone 9pm. I could have arrived in time for the second film of the evening, but had I done so I wouldn't have got to my pit until gone midnight, and with another early start tomorrow I thought better of the idea. Maybe next time...

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