8406/21325 = 0.3941852286049238
I had maybe earned a day off today, after quite an intense and emotional month/last few days. But there's no rest for the wicked. Or the good. Or anyone who has to get out of bed, regardless of their moral stature.
There were kids to get to school, dogs to walk and tennis to be played (all right that one isn't officially work, though it was quite tough after minimal sleep).
The spookiest grave I have found on my dog walks so far (and one that might have inspired a hundred episodes of Dr Who) is this one from the Payne family, as as you approach from the main entrance you are greeted by a veiled figure with its back towards you. Is it a person or a statue? You see pretty quickly that it's a statue. But will it come to life and hunt you down and drag you into the grave it guards? That question is not definitively answered immediately. All I can say is not so far. It is, if anything, more scary when you look at it from the other side. They could have made it scarier though, by having the woman with her back to you from this side too, like she'd just turned round as you rounded the grave.
Still hats off to George Clark Payne (or maybe his wife Miriam) for being able to afford to have a full statue on his grave. That can't have come cheap. George played the game and feared no man, which is a pretty cool epitaph too. Sadly he only got to 45, which is why I play the game, but have a healthy dose of fear in the hope I can get into my 80s. Miriam lived for another 52 years after he was gone, which is its own story, whichever way it went. She got buried with him, even though she'd lived without him for longer than he had lived. So that's a great love story. Is the statue supposed to be Miriam? Waiting by the grave until it becomes her grave too?
George's greatest achievement though must surely be scaring the shit out of people for nearly 100 years with his spooky-ass grave.
Why is Connie not buried with her parents or her husband? I hope she's still alive, though if so will have already done 45 years without her husband. I may be veering into the affairs of the living here, so will draw a veil over it. A veil made of stone. Over my spooky ass face.
Then there were receipts to collate to send to the taxman and a ridiculous amount of forms to fill in as we're changing our mortgage provider (the questions they ask seem designed to be impossible to answer - I can understand why they'd make it difficult to leave an old mortgage behind, but not why it's so hard to set up a new one) and lots of podcast admin.
I then recorded about 20 video messages for lovely Kickstarter backers, in which I usually tried to be pleasant and grateful and Right Bollock called them idiots (hope that was worth the extra money!). Cameo used to badger me a bit to say how many people would pay for these kinds of messages, but it always felt like a bit of a tragic way to make a living and would be annoying both if you had to do loads of messages or hardly any. I generally do them for a charity donation if anyone really wants one. It doesn't seem to be that many people!
I had fun with this lot though and am genuinely grateful to the people who gave a decent whack so we could put out the DVD of Ball Back (it's so nearly ready - we're just waiting for the actual DVDs to turn up and for me to sign some of the covers, so they should be with you for Christmas).
I am going to be releasing a few bonus non-RHLSTP pods this Christmas, so I then recorded an 60+minute Ask Me Anything pod which will be out on Christmas Eve, in which you can find out my favourite terrorist atrocity, whether I was born out of wedlock, if I would ever vote Tory, if I would eat a dinosaur egg and what gift I would have brought the baby Jesus (at last a Christmassy one!). And much more.
So it turned into a pretty full day. I played the game and feared only one spooky statue.
