Driving back from Exmoor to Oxfordshire I decided to “cut the corner” between the M5 and M4 to fit a little geocaching in. My first instinct as to where this was hidden (despite my GPSr
telling me I was wrong) was unsurprisingly unsuccessful, but as soon as I trusted my kit I found the container instantly. As others have said, it’s quite remarkable that it’s still
there considering the severe pollarding that’s clearly taken place recently! Tucked cache a few centimetres deeper into cover to help keep it from prying eyes. TFTC!
Great little cache! Took a break in my cross-country journey to park up and find the caches around this park and was especially pleased by this clever little hide. I was glad of the
hint! TFTC.
Pulled off the M5 on my way back to Oxfordshire from a holiday on Exmoor to find this cache. Unfortunately roadworks in Puriton made driving through require a diversion, so I pulled
over at N 51°10.090 W002°58.710 opposite the Puriton Inn and enjoyed a springtime walk the rest of the way. Yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far but today was a far more
normal temperature, which made for a lovely opportunity to explore the village as I made my way to the GZ. An easy find before a walk back through the church grounds: at first I feared
that the gate at N51°10.225 W002°58.363 might be a fence and that there might be no entry to the church grounds from that angle, but I was luckily proven wrong and got to take a closer
look at this heptocentenian tower before heading back to the motorway. TFTC.
No luck. An extended hunt ended when some muggles accused me of taking photos of them and went to ask the hotel staff to get me to leave (no idea if they would or could, but didn’t want
to make a scene so went). If I come back this way I’ll CITO it to give me an excuse to be standing around!
Disregard my previous log; this cache is still accessible despite both ends of the bridge being fenced-off. Found while pacing about and considering jumping the fence to
continue the hunt: turns out there’s no need! TFTC!
Bridge is now inaccessible from either side – this photo was taken from the Southbound side of the carriageway but you can just about make out similar fencing in place at the other end.
:-(
This month I reminisced about that time Paul made and ate a Birmingham Egg (with help from Jon) and used doing so as a comment on Web siloisation and how it may be reducing
diversity of “weird” content online. I also contemplated what recent observations about neural nets might mean for our understanding of
child psychology and language development (in an only slightly tongue-in-cheek way).
Ruth, JTA, the kids and I took a snowsports holiday to the French alps, where I also found a
handful of geocaches: GLV85XH3, GLV85X2Z, and GLV85W40.
I normally reserve my “on this day” posts to look back at my own archived content, but once in a while I get a moment of nostalgia for something of
somebody else’s that “fell off the web”. And so I bring you something you probably haven’t seen in over a decade: Paul and Jon‘s Birmingham Egg.
Is this honestly so different from the kind of crap that most of our circle of friends ate in 2005?
It was a simpler time: a time when YouTube was a new “fringe” site (which is probably why I don’t have a surviving copy of the original video) and not yet owned by Google, before
Facebook was universally-available, and when original Web content remained decentralised (maybe we’re moving back in that
direction, but I wouldn’t count on it…). And only a few days after issue 175 of the b3ta newsletter wrote:
* BIRMINGHAM EGG - Take 5 scotch eggs, cut in
half and cover in masala sauce. Place in
Balti dish and serve with naan and/or chips.
We'll send a b3ta t-shirt to anyone who cooks
this up, eats it and makes a lovely little
photo log / write up of their adventure.
Sure, this looks like the kind of thing that seems like a good idea when you’re a student.
It was a simpler time, when, having fewer responsibilities, we were able to do things like this “for the
lulz”. But more than that, it was still at the tail-end of the era in which individuals putting absurd shit online was still a legitimate art form on the Web. Somewhere along the
way, the Web got serious and siloed. It’s not all a bad thing, but it does mean that we’re publishing less weirdness than we were back
then.
