Goosey goosey gander

I haven’t seen Stevie since November 3 last year. I know the date exactly because it was the Wednesday before I went to the opera when we unexpectedly bumped into Tom which was the Thursday before my birthday on the Saturday. So we had a lot of catching up to do.

As usual we chatted about everything under the sun after I brought him up to date with the medical situations in Oz. Nicktor has suddenly decided he wants to walk Hadrian’s Wall and I was amazed when telling Stevie that he’d never heard of it. The wall, not Nicktor’s new mania. So, of course, we then had a long chat about the Romans in Britain and the extraordinary wall.

Normally we start drinking in Sovereigns but we’re always chased out by the noise of quiz night (or “…eggheads at Sovs” as Stevie calls it) so this time we decided to go to the Wheatsheaf which is a nicer pub anyway because it serves 6X. Imagine my horror when I was standing at the bar ready to order drinks and noticed a sign which stated that quiz night was Wednesday at 8pm!

When I told Stevie about it he was shocked and horrified that the two best pubs in Woking were unusable on a Wednesday night. We sat, sullenly staring at our beer. This morose mood didn’t last long and we were soon chatting away again.

At about 9:30 I suddenly said “I guess the quiz night is cancelled tonight.” This was very pleasing. We sat and drank and chatted until the bell went and they kicked us out.

I staggered home and was greeted by two insane poodles at about 12:30. Bed was very, very welcome.

I woke up feeling decidedly seedy, dragging myself out of bed at 8am. But drag I had to as I had a lunch date with Dawn today. My second Cansfield this week.

After a lazy couple of hours I managed to stand up under the shower long enough to get clean and set off for Haslemere.

My first stop was the music shop to replace Mirinda’s missing capos for her guitar. Chamberlains is a wonderful music shop with lots of mysterious instruments that always look compelling. They have lots of pianos scattered throughout the first floor and today a tuner was sitting at one constantly hitting a single key, giving very fine adjustments to it before moving on to the next one. It was extraordinarily annoying. I mentioned it to the shop assistant who shrugged and said you didn’t hear it after a while. Fortunately I was only in there for five minutes and left hurriedly, capos firmly held in my hand.

I was a bit early for lunch so I wandered up to the Shottermill ponds to look for something to blip. The geese (there are many of them around the ponds that regularly attack dogs and small children) were all asleep or lying down gazing placidly at the seagulls. This lot were ignoring the traffic.

The sky was nearly all blue today and the pond looked quite picturesque. An excellent blip, I thought, and took this.

I then wandered down to the Mill where Dawn was actually waiting for me. This has never happened before. Not that I can remember anyway. We went in and ordered lunch and beer.

We spent a lovely hour chatting about her PHD, Nicktor’s new walking mania, Blip, going on a dig this year and many other things. For lunch we decided on the Mill pie with vegetables. It was lovely but massive. The veg was very welcome as I’ve not eaten that well this week.

After lunch we drove up to Linchmere to look at the glass door in the lovely little church of St Peter. It’s amazing. It gives a wonderful view of the graveyard and across the valley. It brings the outside world into the church in a wonderful way. And then we spotted my blip for today.

On one of the walls there is a carving. It depicts the seven deadly sins with a row of little marble heads, each representing a sin. It was carved in France during the 14th century. The little heads are marble and the stone they sit in has been carved to look like monkish cowls around them. I blipped ‘envy’ because his face was pretty grotesque. You can see him here.

After taking a few hundred photos, Dawn drove me back to the bus stop at Shottermill and, after a wait of five minutes, I made my way back to Farnham in an empty bus. Well, apart from the driver and me. I felt a bit self-conscious as I’m reading My Family and Other Animals which makes me chuckle on almost every page. The driver did look at me rather oddly when I left the bus.