Washed away

I don’t think I’ve ever known such a wet spell of weather. It doesn’t seem to have stopped raining for the past three months, and whilst excess precipitation doesn’t put such a dampener on things as it would during the summer months, it is still unwelcome, even at this time of year.

With eight days off from work, I had planned to get some more walking under my belt, but given the amount of rain we’ve had during recent weeks, the footpaths and fields are likely to be waterlogged or even impassable.

This is a shame, as it would have been good to have knocked off another section or two of the North Downs Way. I haven’t done any serious walking since completing the Canterbury Loop section back in September, and because of the inclement weather, my plans to strike out westward along the main branch of the trail, have suffered quite a setback.

I’m not a fair-weather walker, but whilst I don’t mind walking through the odd shower, incessant rain is another matter. Getting soaked to the skin is not my idea of fun; been there, done that, got the T-shirt, so with this in mind I will just have to be patient and wait for the arrival of spring – assuming we get a dry one, that is.

I had another reason for looking forward to a walk, and that was to get me out of the house. With Boxing Day a complete washout, I was coped up indoors for the best part of three days, so despite the beginnings of a cold, I  took a drive down into Tonbridge with Mrs PBT's to pick up some bread and milk, plus withdraw some cash.

Bad weather isn’t all bad though, as it affords time to do things indoors that you might have been putting off, not the most enjoyable way to spend time, I’ll grant, but you can devote resources to more fruitful and certainly more satisfying activities, such as planning your next day out, or even that longed for overhead’s trip.

A small selection from my Blog List

There are a few places that I’d like to knock off the bucket list this year, and I was going to do some work on this. However, by the time I'd got back, eaten a couple of left-over sausage rolls and made myself a cup of tea, the cold was starting to take hold. Instead, I decided to carry out a bit of maintenance on the blog and tidy things up a bit.

I've not done anything drastic, such as changed the appearance or background of the site, but I have given my Blog List a long-overdue revamp. This has meant quite a lot of out with the old and in with the new, particularity as there were quite a few sites that I follow that have become either moribund or have given up the ghost completely.

There are probably all sorts of reasons for this - people move on, get bored, lose interest, find something more exciting. Sometimes they sadly pass on completely, and this was the case with Richard Coldwell, whose excellent Beer Leeds website, I only started following a year ago.

So at present, six blogs have been culled from my list, including a few from the odd well-known writer. I shan't list any names, just in case there are perfectly valid reasons for them having given up blogging, but I'm pleased to report there are nine new blogs which are now gracing these pages.

That's kind of what you do at the end of a year, and with the creeping onset of "man flu," that's all I feel like doing at the moment!