Ah, kids....
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♥Jun. 23rd, 2016 // 07:33 pm♥
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Today, I gave five lots of directions to gaggles of girls doing what I very much hope was just practice for their D of E: they were all trying to cross The Horse Next Door's field on the footpath, and they'd all instead ended up on the not-a-footpath that's there because we use it (and, to be fair, is much more visible than the actual footpath, which gets very little use).
Other than the fact that their route-planning discussions were so noisy that they kept waking Jo up so that she could bark at them (not like her, I think they were so loud that she thought they were on the road or in the garden), I wouldn't have minded at all. Except that three of those occasions were the same bloody group....
The third time, I let them get all the way down to the road before I went out, as shouting "you've missed the footpath, it's a couple of meters below the fence line and through the trees" was obviously not working with this lot (the previous two times, they'd turned around and gone back into the woods; the other two groups managed to figure it out so I don't think it was my instructions...).
"Are you lost?" I asked, to be told that, no, they'd finally got it all figured out and they needed to go along the bottom of the valley. As neither of the competent groups had done that, I asked them to show me the map, which they had upside down (this is impressive navigation. I didn't ask if they'd remembered to wipe their feet as they walked through the middle of our house). Once I'd turned their map around and pointed out where they actually need to go, they looked vague again.
"So, we can go through the gate and along this road?" one of them eventually asked me. I agreed that yes, they could, if they wanted to accept the fact their map reading was shockingly bad and that they were trespassing despite having been told twice that they'd missed the footpath: I couldn't possibly say, that was something they'd have to decide for themselves.
Then I went back inside, and was somewhat pleased when, after a five minute conflab, they went back up the hill and, glory be, found the correct route. I'm sure they're currently bitching about me in their youth hostel, and I hope that the other two groups are saying "But she was perfectly nice, she told us just where the path was". I also hope that their teachers give them another lesson in map reading. As Mike pointed out, they probably got lost here because there's no mobile signal!
(A few minutes after that, I heard the clang of TWWOTV's PAI Gate, followed by more conflab. Yes, they had found the footpath, found the stile, and then turned the wrong way on the road but apparently not realised they'd done so until they got back to the bottom of the hill and saw our house again. Sigh.) |
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Oops
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♥Jun. 23rd, 2016 // 11:17 pm♥
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Casually turning the radio on to listen to the first five minutes of R4's vote results in the hope of hearing something about the rumoured exit polls was probably a mistake, wasn't it? |
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