It is Saturday morning now, and in three and a half hours, the biggest local derby between City and Ipswich is taking place at The Carra, the winner goes to the play off final at Wembley next week, the loser plans for another season in the Championship. I have asked a pub in Deal if they will screen the game, the landlord promised. So, that is where I will be from midday.
Thursday. Ascension Day in Denmark. I mention this as it is a public holiday there, and so all of my Danish colleagues are off, and many of them are taking Friday off too, to make a four day weekend. This means that the flood of e mails, which, in all honesty has reduced to a trickle these past few weeks, will stop until Monday. But some people are working, i have meetings to attend, documents to read and update. And anyway, outside the rain poured down.
Jools leaves for work at seven, leaving me and the three sleeping cats. It is not yet raining, but it is dark with the thick clouds, dark enough to need the table light on as i work. Just before eleven the rain starts. Light rain at first, but it is soon steady, and it begins to fall thick enough to seem like mist, hiding the view of the village from the back window.
Work goes on, I listen to the radio as I work, catching up on all the Radcliffe and Maconie shows, until I switch to a few Brief Lives shows on Radio 4, the Sir Joseph Bazalgette show was wonderful, as was the Marlon Brando one, where he is revealed be be a not very nice person, and maybe not a very good actor. Or a very great actor, depending on your point of view.
Jools comes home, we have dinner, and outside the rain may have stopped, but everywhere, and everything, including brave cats, are soaked through. The evening turns to night, we watch The Sky at Night, then some gardening show. We give in to our tired eyes, and head up the wooden hill at nine.
Friday
And what would the day bring? Well, first of all I have to drop Jools off at the station at six so she could catch the train to take her to work, this is so I could have the car for the day.
The station is deserted, and the ticket office not yet open, but the trains are running, so I leave Jools there, drive home for breakfast, and switch the computer on. Only three of us from my department are online, and we have a meeting at nnne, but before then we all have to do some number crunching, to create some KPIs, which our new boss wants us to produce every week. That done, and the follow up meeting completed, I see that the people hosting the really important meeting, after having not cancelled it, are not online when the meeting begins. I sit there on Lync waiting for ten minutes: no one shows up, as expected. Grrrr.
I then spend an hour searching through the audit database looking for a report. I search and search, and cannot even find the report I wrote a while back, let alone the one i need to find. It is midday, sun is breaking through the clouds, I have caught up with work, and I am angry. I switch the computer off, grab my camera bag and work phone, and drive off into the wonderful world of the Kentish Orchid.
I drive to Folkestone, then up Stone Street, before heading off to Pennypot Lane, to the usual parking space. There are six cars there already, which means just one thing, butterfly hunters. See, Denge Wood has two colonys of Duke of Burgundys, which are very rare. But this means that as it is also a nationally important orchid site, the butterfly chasers will flatten the orchids in chasing the butterflies. Uopn arriving, I see that there are only a few flattened orchids, and my initial impressions is, not as bad as I thought, shows how thoughtless some of the snappers can be.
However, upon entering the reserve, I see the Early Purples are now past their best and turning, but almost immediately, I see the first of the Lady Orchids, mostly open, and looking stunning, even if it has clouded up, but it is bright enough to show the orchids off well.
I meet another orchid fan, who engages me in conversation, and is a little bit more fanatical than me, taking in latin names rather than common ones. But he leaves me alone when I begin to snap, but we did bump into each other a few times as we surveyed the site.
There really is nothing finer than to see crowds of Lady Orchids all out, bobbing in the light breeze, and I am in orchid heaven, maybe even orchid nirvana. I snap away, marveling at the range of colours, shapes and sizes of the orchids. Other species are being to grow spikes, and some are near to opening. So, another visit here will be called for.
At the bottom of the site I finally find some pure white variants, and snap them. These are rare, as most very pale variants I have seen still have some pink on the flowers, but not these.
I also manage to snap a Duke, he was basking in the weak sunshine, making a snap very easy.
Before I have to pick up Jools, there is just enough time to visit PGD to check up on the Monkeys, and look at how the site is recovering. It is a short drive, 20 minutes, to the site, along narrow lanes, that undulate along the side of the downs, go through woods, still carpeted with bluebells, it is a wonderful thing, just to see this stuff.
PGD is recovering, but is a long way behind. I find a var. alba Early Purple, and a single Lady Orchid growing, then on the way back I see three Monkey pikes growing, and in another spot where I saw last year some early flowering ones, four more spikes, a little further advanced.
And then it was a dash to get to Hythe to collect Jools. Hythe is at a standstill, seems like the school run, coupled with the usual Friday afternoon traffic means that the roads cannot cope. I make it to the car park tith seconds to spare, and once Jools arrives we take the back roads to get to the other side of the queues so we can take the lanes back up to Dollands Moor and onto the motorway. And to be honest, from there the traffic is very light, we cruise into Dover, along Townwall Street and finally up Jubilee Way and home. All very painless.
We have an early dinner, as we are having an evening out. A random Tweet showed up in my photostream earlier this week, about a show at the Astor Theatre in Deal, a talk about books with the two Marks: Ellen and Billingham. I have to admit not to knowing who Mark Billingham was, but Mark Ellen was a music writer, TV presenter, DJ and magazine editor, who I had followed through his career by accident from one paper to magazine and so on.
We have a couple of hours to kill, first at the Just Reproach, a micropub, and it is heaving, really doing well, and we can only just get in the door, but the beer is good. But we decide to leave. We wander to The Alma where they are showing the football on a large screen, and I get the landlord to promise to show the big game on Saturday for me.
Mark's talk is a delight, going over some of the highlights from 'Rockstars Stole my Life'. Including some that failed to make the cut, embellishing others and taking questions. Mark Billingham is another delight, although his stock in trade is writing about murders. I think we shall seek out his books in due course.
And that is the end, half past ten, time to drive home and hit the sack. After some supper.
A good day.
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