Lord above some people are just... unbelievable!

Hot chocolate is sweetened and may have milk powder mixed in with it so it's instant. Cocoa is made just from cocoa powder, milk, and sugar if you want it. You make it by mixing a little milk with the cocoa powder and then carefully mixing in the hot milk. Much nicer than hot chocolate to my mind.

Oh God I nearly lost a horse to colic after someone fed her a bag of apples.

I think my best one was having to get people to move their camper van off the drive. They'd driven in the open gates, and pulled over onto some grass at the side. The van was locked and there was nobody in sight. The gates were open because a delivery van had been in and as I was going out I hadn't bothered shutting them. Lesson learned.
I got back to find chairs out and tea being cooked. They were most indignant when I told them they were about to be locked in. Funny now, but at the time quite stressful, they were quite unpleasant about it.

DH reminded me of another (among many) incidents from last summer. I have 3 senior horses (24, 28 and 29), people were feeding them loads of things over the wall of the field they’re in so I ran electric fencing around 3 metres inside the field to stop them getting treats. A parent drove up to the house and was screaming at DH incessant with rage that her child had been zapped by the fence because he only wanted to feed the horses apples. There’s signs up warning of the fence and asking people to not feed the horses. 🤦‍♀️

What's the difference between cocoa and hot chocolate?

Probably for the best.

I’d find that funny tbh!

I live in London, in a pub converted into flats. It still has a wide forecourt, rather than a gated garden, and it's amazing how many people come in to have a peer, talk to my window-hammocked cats, or drop their rubbish in our bins. It's as though people dont clock it as real housing, because it doesn't look the norm.

One of my neighbours had a viewing day recently, and I swear every single person waiting for their slot came for a nosey through my big window. Sadly for them I like to sit and read on the other side, so they were all shocked to see my big vis gurning back at them. Probably wrecked a few sales.

“And on this land, I am god!” 😀

Near my folks there is a farm in the village that had a blue plaque. The problem was that to attach it to the actual farm house it would be unreadable from the street and as it’s still a working farm, not to mention private property, they don’t want random people in the yard. So the blue plaque is on a building opposite.

I once asked a person take herself and her dog off our field. She replied “but it’s god’s land” to which I replied “No, it’s my land!”

Yet more proof that the #bekind brigade just wants people to sit down and shut up, ignoring the behaviour that led to the “unkindness” in the first place. Much easier to blame the victim for their reaction rather than take a look at yourself.

WrenNatsworthy

I agree with you to a great extent when we're talking about the super-rich and aristocrats who only want to have 50,000 acres of largely unused land so that they can distance themselves from the great unwashed and casually slip it into conversation all the time to try to impress people.

Yes, they have the right to spend their money as they see fit, but for a lot of them, the history of where they got their money (and influence) is murky in the extreme.

However, when somebody has any amount of land that they actively work and farm, in order to produce food that feeds a great many people, I'm thoroughly grateful to them for doing so and I don't begrudge them their private rights to it one bit.

I was tempted to view a house with a public footpath in front of it, not now. I can all too easily see random people in my garden chairs now.

Oh god, my in laws do this when we visit their relatives up North. Last time we went, MIL in law insisted we went on a drive through the area her mum grew up, and then made us go up the driveway to the house where a former neighbour of her mum had once lived. This house was set back in woodland and secluded, a long dirt track to drive up where it was clearly signposted as 'PRIVATE'. She then insisted we all got out the car to go wandering around the garden and peering in through the windows, so she could give us a tour. Lights and a TV were, so people were home!

I refused to get out of the car as I thought this was so inappropriate, and trespassing! But she was just "Oh they won't mind, they'd probably like to meet us, and can tell them all about mum and blah blah blah".... why would these total strangers, just minding their own business watching tv in their own home, want to meet the random daughter of an elderly woman (who'd moved from the area in her teens) just because that elderly woman once upon a time knew the person who had once lived in that house decades ago?

I kicked up a bit of a fuss, saying how rude and intrusive this was, and insisted we left. MIL said I was being silly and had spoiled things. But MIL lives in the countryside, fairly secluded herself, and if some randomer with a family in tow decided to come up her driveway, peer into her windows and mooch about, she'd be straight on the phone to the police and sending FIL out with the air rifle!

It's madness how some people think they're entitled to just commandeer other people's private spaces without any thought for their privacy or legal ownership.

I live in a Scottish town which is now basically a dormitory town for one of the big cities. I happen to have a large back garden with a decent sized shrubbery.

There's a public path alongside the length of my front and back gardens. It leads to a football park. Beyond that, there's woodland.

There are two primary schools close by. I found out from the neighbours that local children were using both my gardens as a picnic area during lunch hour, while my late husband and I were both at work. No one ever challenged them, of course.

We also had a problem with 'courting couples' making use of the back garden in the evenings.

The garden is now an overgrown mess, following building work and family illness. I'm now trying to get it back into shape, but it's taking a long, long time. However more recently, during lockdown, I had a problem with dog walkers coming into the garden after their dogs got in because they'd been let off the lead. There are clear boundaries - fencing and hedges all round - but the council butchered their side of the hedge, meaning that dogs could slip through the stick fence at the back.

In the end, I used up all the scrap wood in the garage - used my multitool to cut points on the end of each piece of wood, screwed a couple of cross bars onto the existing fence posts, affixed the spare wood as uprights and painted it all with the leftover Cuprinol in the garage.

I posted a pic on FB and a friend commented that it looked as if it had been constructed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It works, though.

Do you open your garden and or house to the public?

I saw a couple of months ago loads of people had driven into a farmers field for an illegal rave. Rather than call the police on them, he blocked all but one exit and charged each car £20 to leave the next morning 😂

Good times

Cocoa because it's too cold for lashings of ginger beer maybe? Many people drink cocoa believe it or not.

I would have chased them off with a shotgun!

Why not invite them in for bloody supper as well? Of course they're taking the piss. They're trespassing and the deckchairs are clearly not there for public use.

I thought that in Enid Blyton it was always “Lashings of ginger beer”!

😂very funny!

I feel your pain. We have a farm with a footpath and people are always wandering on our land and trespassing on our crop fields.