The half-truths are usually quicker! People get lost all the time!

But yeah, more-often when asked what I’m doing somewhere (doing something weird) I’ll explain the truth. At the 2018-10-16 52 -0 hashpoint I met a local landowner who saw me putting up a “the Internet was here” sign… coincidentally, I was wearing a high-vis jacket and near the site of a controversial wind farm construction project, and he assumed I’d been sent to sneakily put a planning permission application document up! So I was certainly glad to be able to explain to him that no, I wasn’t erecting more windmills in his back yard. (Personally, I’m a big fan [LOL] but I know some folks don’t like them.)

And when I met somebody near the 2019-05-27 51 -1 hashpoint who wondered what I was doing taking photos near the lamp post at the end of their residential cul-de-sac, I explained that I was playing an online game where you have to go to random coordinates, and today’s coordinates were there.

The difference with this retrohash was that (a) I had knowingly strayed from a public footpath without first asking a landowner, which could well be trespassing, and (b) while geohashing can just-about be explained to a stranger (it’s random coordinates!), retrohashing is harder (it’s random coordinates… but I was able to pick which ones, sort-of?) and my justification for possibly-trespassing would be way weaker-sounding! When the woman and her dog came out to meet me they had a definite tone of “what the hell are you doing here?” and I just wanted the quickest resolution: the last thing I wanted would be to have to explain retrohashing to a local copper and making the claim that what I was doing should definitely count as lockdown-suitable “exercise” and not e.g. classed an illegal “picnic” just because I happened to have a sandwich in my backpack.

(I also didn’t want to spend a long time in close proximity to a stranger without our masks on.)

So yeah, this time I opted for a quick and easy lie. But usually, I’m absolutely in favour of introducing people to my strange hobby!