Showers forecast...

...but sadly, not the sort I was expecting. Let me explain.

Yesterday being Sunday, I decided to finish digging out the last sodding soil bed by taking a few hours to go detecting in a rather old Dorset village nearby. I hadn't done any research on these fields, but the village was already there in 1066 so I felt that in nine hundred and fifty years someone was bound to have dropped something. And I was right.


In a few hours I pulled out three bronze roman coins (sadly unrecognisable, a sad indication of what chemical fertilizers do to the soil) and a damaged roman silver, a couple of buckles, a musket ball, and a split hammered coin (from Scotland no less, an Alexander III silver penny from 1280-1286). Nothing of any large monetary value, but enough to convince me that the field's a good'un. As is the nature of detecting I'd left it a bit late going home, and my bladder was uncomfortably full.

Ah, I see you have an inkling of where this is going. Courage. It won't take long.

The weather had been threatening all day with cell after cell of cold, gusty air pushing half-hearted wintery showers through. I'd been ignoring it as best I could, resplendent in my über-nerd red kagoul and woolly hat, but there was no diguising the fact that it had got a bit gusty. Despite all this there were occasional pedestrians walking along the line of the hedge a few hundred feet away, so being the soul of discretion I moseyed along to the nearest hedge, which so happened to be up on a raised bank which cut across the flow of the wind.



What happened next should really be included in textbooks for students of aerodynamics. As I realise now, right at the base of the bank there was a very strong updraft, and in Hedgewizard's wind shadow there was a zone of negative pressure... the upshot of which was that I was suddenly enveloped in a fine mist which was backlit through the skeletal hedgerow in a manner that, frankly, would have made Ridley Scott clap his hands like a baby. So taken aback was I that I started to laugh, which made bladder control unthinkable and caused a pedestrian to stop and stare across the field at me. I hate to think exactly what he saw...

Needless to say, detecting for the day ceased as soon as I stopped feeling moist and even now HW's clothes are having their final rinse. At least something in the house is warm...