Witchford walk

I scanned barcodes at parkrun with a teenage boy who has only been to parkrun once before, when he marshalled. Volunteering at parkrun seems popular with teenage boys because it counts towards their Duke of Edinburgh awards.

I’d done barcode scanning once before, so I was deemed the ‘expert’. I showed the lad the ropes I could remember, and the volunteer coordinator helped with everything else. The lad did good.

After that, I went out walking with Mr Pandammonium. We took the train to Ely, then took a circuitous route cross-country to Witchford.

En route, we could see the business park. A brown building and a white building had weird effects going on. Remember in the olden days when analogue channels stopped their broadcasts for the night and the screen showed hissy snow? That’s what the white building looked like. The brown building looked like that, but brown. We were intrigued.

We noticed two people in black on another path towards Witchford across the fields and some other people wearing black coming towards us from Witchford. We all crossed paths between stacks of giant shredded wheats. All I’m saying is that witches wear black. We reached the village unscathed.

After visiting the local hostelry for a burger, we set off back to Ely. We took a detour through the business park to find the weird snow buildings. Up close, they were astoundingly disappointing. They were both made of painted horizontally corrugated metal that didn’t move one iota.

We got back on track and crossed the A10 into Ely proper. We happened upon West End House, where we had a nice rest.

Heading back to the train station, it seemed rude not to go in the Fountain, seeing as it was actually open. They had a bespoke OS map centred on Ely on the wall, so we spent quite some time looking at that.

We caught the train home, then pigged out on dumplings and bao buns.