Can’t see the wood for the trees …

We drove down to the New Forest late morning. It was a hot day and when we left it was already 26° but once we were on the motorway with the Aircon blasting we were cool. Apart, that is, from the moment when some idiot attempted to overtake us at 90 miles an hour on the inside just as we were changing lanes. This was by far the worst of several examples of bad driving we were to witness before getting home at half seven in the evening. We must have missed the memo that said today was National Drive Like An Idiot Day.

Made a brief loo stop at some motorway services.   When we drove off again TSM commented that I have not had anything to eat all day. I confessed that during her absence in the toilets I had dipped into Greggs and got myself a vegan sausage roll. This is a perk from my bank - every Monday I get a voucher for a sausage roll that I have to have to use within the week.

We drove into the new forest with all the cute little ponies and horses everywhere wandering across the road. Then we had our picnic in a little wooded area with a large clearing which boosted nothing more than wooden toilets. There were only a handful of other people there but they were all fully equipped with folding chairs and picnic tables and other paraphernalia of the organised British picnicking middle classes. Our lunch however was triumphant, a mix of out of date salads, boiled eggs and vegetables that I had rescued from the back of the fridge and somehow assembled into something edible and in fact tasty. Some fresh fruit from Marks & Spencer's completed our feast. 

After lunch we sat on our makeshift picnic blanket and talked nonsense for about half an hour, recalling things we had read when we were at school. This was prompted by TSM remembering a book called "children of the new forest" set in in the era of Cavaliers and Roundheads. It led us on to topics such as what a pompous prick DH Lawrence was, how Thomas Hardy was depressing enough to make anyone want to hang themselves, and the merits or otherwise of 19th and 20th century poets. I had been force fed Tennyson -

The mirror cracked from side to side
"The curse is come upon me" cried
The lady of shallot.

We went for a walk. The forest was lovely - massive pines, woodpeckers and shafts of sunlight coming down through the trees. We did our best to stick to the shady paths in the 30° heat. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of going off piste and very soon found ourselves in thickets where every branch seemed determined to get into TSMs hair and into my pants. Worse every tree seem to telegraph to the one ahead to tell them to make our life miserable by deploying their thickest branches.

I suddenly remembered that scene in Lord of the rings where Frodo and Sam are lost and find themselves going round in circles and have to be rescued by their arch enemy Gollum, which is the beginning of a series of tragic events. In fact at one point I hallucinated them hiding in the bushes staring at us. 

The whole thing then turned to farce. I fell over in a ditch and ended up ankle deep in mud and then finally tipped over on my bottom. Jerome K Jerome would have had a field day with our antics, making me out to be as incompetent as that buffoon Harris in Three Men in a Boat.

We stopped at the Stag in Lyndhurst for a drink afterwards. It’s a grubby little town with horrendous traffic. The pub was nothing special but the beer that they served was excellent. I had two pints of green King IPA to help me recover from my serious incident in the ditch. In the pub garden a group of pissed pensioners were laughing and one of them was pulling up the hem of her dress to show her friends the colour of her underwear. They did not realise I was there until it was too late at which point they burst out into fits of laughter and the guilty party started shouted at me "they’re  only cycle shorts, I’m not showing off my knickers!"

There is nothing so funny as a group of drunken old ladies behaving disgracefully. Bless ‘em.

We had a bit of traffic on the way home. The house was like a furnace. It really had been hot today. So we camped out in the garden until well after dark.

Postscript:

I often use dictation software when I’m writing anything of length which is what I’ve done today. But I didn’t realise that at one point I must’ve pressed a wrong button because my dictation went from English to French. The results are reproduced below. It seems to tell a story about a man called Kevin and his adventures with a steak and some langoustine. Twiggy, someone called Leslie and the Spanish secret service also seem to be involved. Not knowing any French I must rely on one of you to translate for me. It sounds like a jolly exciting story.

Peut-être oui, mais il faut 1 kg de steak Kevin :-) hors-piste elle fin de la séance il habite où on est en selfie qui est faux stop Évry trier Saint-Agrève langoustines Twiggy franchise un live parce que c'est mon rêve ou c'était une Chicha lisez attentivement les pinces. Faut stop dans le sanitaire antistress intelligence est un Espagne. Tu es faut stop, oui garde-le pour Leslie .