One of the lessons drummed into you when learning to fly is to trust your instruments. Humans are generally very easily disoriented, whereas electronics generally less so. If you’re stuck in cloud and don’t know which way is up, trust that your artificial horizon will.

I broke the cardinal rule today, and was summarily punished. However the instrument I ignored was a GPS and I wasn’t so much flying as I was walking. Trudging through a relatively dense deciduous woodland the floor of which was covered in a beige leaf litter carpet several inches deep, I was looking for a geocache: again. Having initially failed to find the cache I decided to head back to my car. Usually my sense of direction is pretty good, but having followed my gps on the way in I realised after walking for ten minutes that I had no idea where I was going.

When I looked at my GPS I’d assumed, incorrectly it turn out, that the track it was suggesting was wrong because I was stationary and the tree cover was pretty heavy. So my penance for this particular error was a quarter mile walk up a very steep hill. Next time I’ll trust my technology, I still can’t believe I didn’t!

Oh, and I did eventually find the cache.

It’s not often you get to crouch in the woods while a pair of WAH-64 “Apache” helicopter gunships wander by at treetop height, but that’s exactly what I got to do today. The crouching can be explained by the fact that I was searching for a geocache container. The helicopters I can’t so easily explain. I presume they were either on a training flight or being moved between bases. It took very little imagination to perceive just how intimidating such a scenario would be if those helicopters were actually coming for me. It has been many, many years since my mind has been tempted to conjure up a little imaginary world for me; but just for a few seconds today, I was indeed being hunted down by secret military helicopters.

As I wandered back to the car down a leaf littered lane I saw a couple of deer emerge out of the woods ahead of me. I stood still and watched as the larger of the two dear looked straight at me, shook its head and cantered across the path and back into the woods. I could be mistaken, but I think even the deer thought I really ought to act my age.

Today was a salutary lesson about not repeating the mistakes of the past. Now I will without doubt do this again, so there’s no real lesson learned, just another tick for my list.

I went out with the intention of Geocaching. I had the co-ordinates in my GPS, a venerable old Garmin 12CX. What I didn’t have was the location of the cache in terms of road navigation. So rather than look that up, I set the GPS to compass mode and headed off. Typically I’d chosen a cache out in the wilds; relatively! So I found myself driving down various single track roads, then cart tracks, then little more than someone else’s wheel ruts. 15miles as the crow flies certainly takes a long time to navigate when you’re going anything but straight. Finally I found the parking site for the cache. I looked around and frankly it wasn’t immediately obvious where I should head. Worse still it was now quite obvious that within 5 minutes it was going to be pitch black and I didn’t have a torch.

More than a little irritated I gave up and headed home via the main roads I should have used when getting there in the first place. Sum total of day : Wasted.

And not the good kind of wasted either.

The internet is chock full of usernames. My very first username, chosen in the days of 1200/75 baud modems was aviation related. I’ve long since jettisoned that particular moniker. My next choice of pseudonym was flashbak, which was a poor one not least due to the tendency for it to get “auto-corrected”; although it was a salutary lesson in temper control after the 59th person questions the missing “c” and rather than beating them senseless with their own shoes you calmly explain that it was intentional.

Sadly there came a point where the internet had grown so large, yes that’s right I firmly believe at least some of you reading this should not be allowed into internet-land, that even my “crazy” spelling wasn’t enough to make my username unique. So having long ago accepted that my private and public personas really were one and the same I took the obvious path of least resistance and started using my name.

Now my name whilst statistically unlikely to be unique is probably at the less common end of the spectrum. However while that has served me for a number of years, I now notice there’s another me using MY name and distorting MY internet persona. Argh!

I could have avoided this conflict if I’d chosen to use my full name. “What, Ian Stopher isn’t your full name?” I hear you ask. Well no, my full legal name is much, much longer. You could mistake me for a pedigree dog you really could; although obviously without the fur and the panting. I really do think I was named by committee, thankfully I’m pretty sure I wasn’t made by committee though which is a relief for all concerned I’m sure.

So what was all this ranting really about? Well it gives me a chance to impart two pieces of information. Firstly to the person that enquired about my Geocaching name, I think I’ve now given you a pretty big hint! Secondly if you ever find poetry linked to my name, it isn’t me alright. I don’t do poetry. I have nothing against poetry, but any poetry on the interwebs isn’t mine. Alright?