Sploration The First

CGF Sprog 1 has a weekend job as a home care assistant, and Saturday evening she phoned to say she had dropped her phone somewhere between clients. Because she was using a client’s phone, she didn't have time to give much information other than "somewhere between This Road and That Road; I travelled in a straight line between the two".

OK, we'll go out and search for your phone.

Now, This Road is a fairly long street at one end of Eastleigh; That Road is equally long but at the other end of town. As we had no information as to which houses she had been to, we had to walk the entire length of each. And the streets between – guessing, at times, which route was the most "straight-line" (and sometimes doubling back where there were two possibilities). We checked the road, the pavement, the gutter, under cars. I even peered through at the railway where the path went over a footbridge. Two hours we were out there. No phone found.

CGF Sprog 1 got home a few minutes after we did and went to her bedroom. "Oh look!" she exclaimed. "my phone was on my desk all the time – I didn’t take it out with me!"

Sploration The Second

A few months ago Stepfie told me about a lake to the north of the town which, despite having lived in Eastleigh for most of my working life, I had never heard of – and, indeed, despite having walked footpaths near them.

So Sunday we decided to have a Spedition to find this lake. I had a quick look at the map before we left to confirm where the lake was, and vaguely how to get there, and off we stepped.

We did quite well using my Man’s Sense of Direction. The lakes are behind some houses, so I figured if we walked up the street we would find a path. And we did. We followed the path through some woodland, then took a left which took us up over a football pitch and then dropped down in to … er … another street. Well, we weren’t expecting that. Of course, despite certain views to the contrary, we weren’t lost. We just didn’t know where we were.

CGF reached for her smart phone to check google maps. I went to ask a passer-by. And in that battle between technology and sociability – sociability won. Not only did I find out where we were, I found out how to get to the lake. Meanwhile Google maps was having problems pinpointing our location, but thought we might be near London – only 70 miles out.

Turned out that had we walked across the football pitch instead of round it, we would have found the path we wanted. Another pleasant woodland walk and we discovered the lake. On our way back we found an easier, but not nearly so much fun, route.

When I bought my car last month, the dealer gave me one of those “introduce a friend” reward voucher. I nodded and smiled. I don’t have many friends; still fewer that are planning to buy a car; and even fewer that would be buying a car from this dealer.

But, what do you know? In casual conversation a colleague mentioned that he was considering buying a car from this dealer. Fantastic. My £100 loyalty reward arrived this morning.

Yeah, my dairlyland template has changed. I was trying to do something clever, but broke it, so had to return to one of the pre-built templates. I think I’ve got it more-or-less back to what was, but may tweak it a bit over the next few weeks – please shout if you think something’s missing.