Our neighbour has returned from a holiday in Gambia, where she encountered someone geocaching. She looked it up on her return to the UK and has become well and truly hooked on it.

I must say, it’s something that had passed by my radar (or should I say satellite) and I’ve had to have it explained to me three times and still I’m not convinced but DM has embraced the idea quite thoroughly. So much so that he spent a fruitless ten minutes or so poking around in a local ancient monument looking for the cache without the paperwork and therefore the clues as to where to find the item.

For those (like me) who’ve no clue what this is all about, it’s basically a sort of high-tech treasure hunt. You get a grid reference and a set of clues and you have to find the treasure hidden at the location. You need a GPS receiver to locate the spot. When you find it you get a little gift (my understanding is that it’s pretty obligatory for them to be nasty plastic things) and a bit of paper to register that you’ve really actually found it. You have to replace the nasty plastic thing you take with something similar so there is treasure for the next person to find. Oh and apparently you have to find it without drawing attention to the fact that you’re looking for something so that if there are any other geocachers looking on then their experience won’t be spoiled by seeing someone else find the cache.

I think that’s it in a nutshell.

So, I was standing in the garden chatting to Annie who asked me if DM would be prepared to test a couple of caches that she’s planted before she posts them on the website.

Because it’s so difficult to do any real cooking in our kitchen at the moment (no sink hampers the culinary capabilities), I cooked up a plan – we’d all go to look for the caches, including dogs, then we’d go to the pub, have a few beers and double egg, chips and beans for three and pork scratchings for two (dogs). Not only that but the dogs got a huge lump of scrap pork, hand fed to them by the pub’s landlady who is turning out to be a complete gem.

This is DM, having found the first cache, with a pleased looking Annie who’s glad she tested it because she’d got the wrong co-ordinates in the clues. I suppose the only thing that worries me slightly is that in a hundred years time, people will be finding plastic boxes shoved into strange places with strange toys inside.