test please delete

[zeitghost]

Existentially Bored Now.

And too goddamn hot with it.

[FiveTimes]

Afternoon

[FiveTimes]

had to take pooch to the vets at lunch today, so I WFH.
Nothing wrong with pooch, apart from possibly having hayfever

So its Piriton tablets squished into a little bit of cheese.

And pooch has also lost a little bit of weight now. Down from 5.6kgs to 5.2kgs

[zeitghost]

Buggered off early today since there was little point in hanging about on my lonesome in a furnace.

The aircon was working nicely on the 125 at 16:29.

The ZeitStandard liver, onion gravy and bacon was cooked & consumed.

Managed to get the bacon reasonably crisp this time, but it may just be that it's a different sort to what I had last time.

The stench pipe is still leaning away from the wall so I'm off to B&Q shortly to get some brackets.

Assuming, of course, that they have some in stock.

In other news, the ZeitDermatitis is doing its thing with a vengeance at the moment.

[NickFitz]

Home!

Very good run back after a shaky start caused by a broken-down van blocking one lane of the A14 - made it back before the six o'clock bongs on Radio 4

It's very close and overcast here, but it looks like we won't get the benefit of a thunderstorm

[NickFitz]

And right now thirty years ago, Deborah and I were bimbling about getting our act together, ready to join a few hundred other people being escorted by police eight miles down the A303 on foot to Stonehenge for the Solstice sunrise

They thought a bunch of useless hippies would take about four hours to get there. We arrived at around half two. At one point the police asked us all not to walk so fast, as they were getting tired. So we started running for a hundred yards or so; they didn't ask again

Right now thirty years ago, we'd made it back to Leicester

After sunrise at the stones, we'd walked the eight miles back to Devil's Dyke, where word was that the police would like us all to clear the site by 1pm. As they'd been reasonable (eventually) about letting us walk to the stones, people were generally OK with this. (The fact that they would come in mob-handed and drive us over the land with big sticks if we didn't go helped convince us.) So we grabbed a couple of hours sleep in the tent, then packed up ready to hit the road. It was a Sunday, so we weren't sure how the hitching would be.

We were walking off site at twelve thirty, expecting to have to trek down through Shipton Bellinger to start hitching home on the A338, when some people in an extremely decrepit-looking Land Rover shouted over asking if we wanted a lift. We piled in the back, and they took us down to the centre of Tidworth and dropped us off. We found a spot just up the road where people could stop safely, and stuck our thumbs out.

The second car to come past stopped! It was some chap heading to Swindon to visit his girlfriend, and he went out of his way to drop us on the ring road where the road to Oxford joined it. By now it was nearly two o'clock and we decided to look for a pub - and there turned out to be one just around the corner, the White Hart. In those days, the pubs closed at half two on Sunday so we just had time for a couple of quick pints. Two chaps who were at the next table struck up a conversation, asking us what had gone down at Stonehenge, and it turned out one of them used to do the Aldermaston marches, so we all had a good chinwag about various encounters we'd had with the police while opposing the State, which is an excellent way to spend a Sunday lunchtime

Bidding them adieu we walked back across the junction to a safe spot on the Oxford Road. This time, incredibly, the very first car stopped!

The driver turned out to be a town planner from Milton Keynes, who'd been at Glastonbury which was the same weekend, but was heading home early. He used to hitch a lot when he was a student and went massively out of his way to drop us at a good spot for getting back to Leicester: Jack's Hill Cafe on the A5, outside Towcester. That was a brilliant place, a transport caff seemingly untouched since the Sixties, and we both got a large fry-up and a cup of tea. At the next couple of tables was what turned out to be a group of Greenham Women, heading south after spending a couple of weeks at the Faslane Peace Camp, so of course they were interested to hear what had gone on down in Wiltshire overnight.

Heading back out, we were walking towards the road to start hitching again when a middle-aged couple parked just under the windows of the caff shouted over to us - they were heading up the A5, did we want a lift? It turned out they lived in South Wigston, a small town just outside Leicester, which I happened to know well as that was my patch when I worked for Age Concern the year before. Their car was poorly, with the engine constantly threatening to cut out, and they weren't able to go much above thirty mph, which was why they weren't taking the M1. So they conveyed us very slowly up the A5 and across to Wigston.

Once there, we found out we only had a few minutes to wait for a bus into the city centre, where we arrived at six thirty. So we'd made it back from the middle of nowhere on the Wiltshire-Hampshire border to the centre of the city where we lived in precisely six hours, on a Sunday, including a visit to the pub and lunch at the caff

As the pubs didn't open until seven on a Sunday evening in those days, we spent half an hour chilling on the lawn in Town Hall Square before being the first customers of the evening in The Globe for another well-earned pint, or more

It was a damn good Solstice, all in all

[WTFH]

Evening all well that was an adventure.

[NickFitz]

Southern fried chicken bits (M&S, not actually fried) and chips for dinner, because it's too hot to make anything more complicated

[SueEllen]

Exercise done - feel light headed
Lots of fluid drunk
Random food eaten
Plants watered
Noticed lots of people are out running now as it is apparently 24 Celsius

[zeitghost]

Stench pipe now fixed to the wall.

Finished job about 21:15.

And now it's raining.