Sunshine and Showers…

One of the things I was not looking forward to on moving to the country is that complete misnomer the power shower. For some reason – perhaps it’s the law – all rural properties have to have an electric shower instead of running it off the hot water like normal people do. You know the sort of thing I mean. First you have to turn it on using a ceiling-mounted power-breaker that is there to remind you that you are about to step naked into a device that is the safety equivalent of a live hairdryer dropped into a bath*. Then you turn it on and wait for it to emit a luke-warm dribble. If you’re lucky, that is how it will stay. If you’re unlucky, it will start to oscillate wildly between a scalding dribble and a burst of freezing cold water while you try and wash your hair in the moments when it passes through a reasonable temperature. The other half – who is an American and considers decent plumbing one of his constitutional rights – once came out of a particularly egregious example of a rural shower threatening to hunt down and kill the executives of the M*** shower company. I know how he feels.

But here’s the thing. We’re staying at Huttonian’s, and one of the drawbacks of his place – apart from the fact that it’s the coldest house in Christendom – has always been the showers. And the showers haven’t changed. They’re still luke-warm dribbles. The difference is us: after two months of our own rural dribble, they just don’t feel too bad. We’re becoming acclimatised… or brainwashed, perhaps?

*That may also be how it works

Food For Free

Top tip for those moving to the country – get someone with some botanical expertise, such as my sister*, to come and visit early on and identify all those things in the hedgerow for you. That way you won’t miss the fact that those funny looking brambles by the side of the road are in fact wild raspberries complete with delicious ripe raspberries. It’s even better if they tell you before they and their daughter have scarfed the lot, but never mind. I’m sure some more will ripen eventually…

And speaking of families, we’ll be off helping Huttonian downsize for the next few days. I may blog, I may not. It will depend on whether I can get a word in edgeways at the computer.

*Not babymother but the non-blogging one. Every family has a black sheep, you know.

The Problem With…

… slow bicycling is that the flies find it easier to keep up with you. And if flies are irritating when you’re on foot, they’re absolutely infuriating on a bike. There’s a long, long hill coming back from the paper shop, and I’d pretty much shot my bolt getting out of the saddle to accelerate past a tractor that had kindly stopped to wait for me to go through. So I had reached the stage of just plodding doggedly upwards when the flies gathered. Perhaps it was the sweat, perhaps, like the buzzard, they were too impatient to wait for me to collapse, or perhaps it amuses them to drive cyclists to distraction. Fortunately, once the tractor had gone there was no-one to see me cycling along with my hands whirling madly about my head. I’m beginning to envy the horses their tails – do you think I could fit one on a bike?

Listen Very Carefully, I Will Do This Only Once

I do not, as a rule, do memes. But as I’ve been tagged by Biking Brits, and it seems churlish not to, here goes. Six random things about me. Or rather, not random exactly, but six carefully selected ’strange but true’ facts designed to make me seem fascinating while still preserving some vestigial air of mystery about me:

1. I am left handed. I think this has significantly warped my personality, but in a good way.

2. I used to play polo. Yes, the horse kind. No, I’m not that sort of a person, honestly. I was extremely bad at it, but if you like charging about on (someone else’s) horse, it’s amazing fun. Hitting the ball is optional, at least the way I played it.

3. At school I was in the fire brigade. I was also quite bad at that, because I had no upper body strength whatsoever, but prior to that the only connections girls had with the fire brigade was being rescued at Speech day demonstrations so I like to think I struck a (feeble) blow against inequality.

4. During the 1983 election we had a mock election at school and I stood as a Conservative and won a landslide victory. I have no idea what I was thinking at the time. Since then I have voted for every other major party except the ones with ‘nationalist’ in their titles.

5. As a child, pretty much no fruit or vegetable matter whatsoever passed my lips, with the exception of baked beans and orange juice. I was the original picky child. Since then, I’ve gradually been working my way through the vegetable kingdom and now eat most vegetables except those beginning with ‘C’. Parents of fussy children, take heart.

6. But I still can’t stand apples. I don’t even like to touch one, let alone eat it. This despite the fact that I don’t know what they taste like, because eeuw, that would mean eating one.

I’m not tagging anyone in particular, but if anyone wants to consider themselves tagged, feel free. And this is the last meme I will be doing, so I hope you enjoyed it.

Wheeldie-beests

Oh boy, I’m home. And let me tell you, it was something else to drive down the country lanes just now and see the glorious evening light picking out the hills and dykes and trees and cows and all the assorted greenery. Ahhhh

I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it, though. When I got to Euston (after one last nostalgic run-in with Silverlink-as-was – ah those were the days, how did I ever survive commuting on those trains for so long?) there was trouble with the overhead wires, trains cancelled left and right, trains delayed, trains being guarded by platform staff because they were so packed ‘it’s beyond standing in there.’ The train I – and what felt like half of London – was aiming for was the 14:46 for Glasgow Central. The announcements were advising passengers to stay on the concourse and keep an eye on the departure boards because they were trying to turn trains around quickly, but it was largely redundant. Every single passenger, it seemed, was thronged in front of the boards, staring at them, poised for the off. As the Glasgow Central train showed up as ‘being prepared’, people started to move forward, jockeying for the best position, as near the front as possible, but still within eyesight of the boards so as to get the best possible start when the platform was announced. ‘bing – bang – bong’ went the tannoy, platform 4 came up, and the crowd was off before the announcer could clear his throat.

It was terrifying, even for a hardened commuter like me. It was more like a stampede than a train boarding, but a stampede where almost every participant had a wheelie suitcase in tow. Dodging through the concourse, down the ramp, past the Virgin staff who were just standing well back out of the way. Men in suits were weaving through the crowd at a sprint, coffee cups and laptops flying as they went.  I had been canny enough to travel light and had only a shoulder bag and a backpack. I pity anyone with kids, or non-wheeled suitcase, or a stick. This was survival of the fittest at its most raw.

In the end, I could walk fast enough to get to the front of the train ahead of most of the bunch, and when I got on the train there were seats aplenty. Not quite a table, but facing forwards and at the window. The slower, the less well prepared, the halt and the lame were in the corridors until Wigan North West. Anyone else remember when going by train was the civilised way to travel?

London? I’m not missing it a bit.

Because Heat Magazine won’t Buy Itself…

Yep, I’m off down to London again. This time I failed to book a seat on the train either way because – in the words of the guy at the train station – ‘there are unreservable carriages’. When I asked which ones, he said he didn’t know.

‘It’s what happens in the summer often,’ he said. ‘They like to just cram them on…’

I had been planning to get some work done on the train, but I think I’ll revise that ambition in favour of more achievable goals, like finding a seat.

Back on Friday

Slow Bicycle Race

I keep thinking – having recently signed up to the nascent Slow Bicycle Movement – that I ought to write more about my thrice-weekly trips down to Papershop Village. But the problem is, they’re largely uneventful. Stonehead has had enough run ins with cars on his bike to make me think that Scottish rural drivers were at least as unpleasant – and therefore good sources of blogging material – as their London equivalent. But I meet very few vehicles and apart from the odd person going too fast, everyone’s been courteous to a fault – giving me as much room as there is on these narrow roads, and slowing down too as they pass me when it’s a tight gap. I try and return the compliment, pulling over to let the tractors past (there really only is just room for a tractor on the road that makes up most of my route), timing my approach so I meet the cars where the road widens, and doing all the waving, returning of greetings and generally being polite that I can muster. The other day, not one but two tractors pulled over and waited a good few minutes to let me past. And today a driver – on his mobile too – waved me on through a gap when I had pulled aside already to give way. Is it something in the water?

I’ve been trying to figure it out. I don’t really think that country people are necessarily nicer – or even less stressed – than city folks (after all, I’m still me). It could be that I see few enough cars that I’ve just got statistically lucky and the real dickheads are still out there, waiting for a wet miserable day* to send me careening into a hedge. But my theory – developed as I ride unhindered past glorious damp scenery looking at all the cows and birds and loping hares and squashed hedgehogs – is that it’s just human nature. I’ve done the ride enough times now that I’m getting to be a fixture on the road. The cars that use this back road are likely to be locals, as are the tractors. The chances are high that anyone I meet on the road, I’m going to end up meeting socially at one event or another. And nobody wants – once the introductions have been made, and we’ve worked out who we are – to be greeted with the words, ‘oh so you’re the arsehole who …’

*oh no, wait …

Not Dead Yet

I was coming back from my run this morning in the rain (have I mentioned it’s been raining?) when I was buzzed by a buzzard. Not once, but four or five times, the last time so low that I could hear the rush of air over its wings as it passed. They’re big birds, buzzards – not as big as eagles but big enough, frankly, under the circumstances. And I know I look like hell when I’m running, but I do wish they’d grant me the courtesy of waiting until I have actually collapsed, before coming in to deal with the corpse.

Contrary to Popular Belief…

…not all Radio 4 weather forecasts end ‘And finally, Scotland.’ Sometimes they end ‘And finally, Scotland and Northern Ireland.’

Actually it’s generally bad news when they start with Scotland. That’s usually when the weather here is going to be particularly and interestingly unpleasant. I had completely lost the habit of listening to the forecast in London because it didn’t really matter what it was going to be like as I was only going to be on the bike or walking for five or ten minutes at a time. But here, where almost all of our recreational activities are outdoors, it does matter, although there’s not much we can do about it. When we had visitors the other weekend we ended up visiting an old lead mine on the grounds that it couldn’t be raining underground.*

The other day, I did listen to the forecast, and then I forgot all about it until I was at the furthest point out of a lunchtime walk and it started to rain. The weather had gone from hot and sultry to interestingly cloudy to really quite threatening and although I had had the sense to wear a jacket, I had not anything particularly waterproof, no hat and no umbrella. Which is when the words of the forecaster came back to me. ‘Unfortunately,’ he had said, going into what I thought was unnecessary detail at the time, ‘because of the light winds today, any rain you do get is likely to be heavy and quite prolonged.’ Sometimes those bastards at the weather centre get it absolutely spot on. All the way back his words were running around in my head in a mocking refrain. I got back in full-on drowned rat mode and had to dry myself out on the Rayburn.

This weekend we have been trying another tactic. Instead of waiting for it to stop raining, we tried simply ignoring the rain and going for a walk anyway. How wet can you get? We thought. Answer: very wet indeed. Any suggestions on how to deal with this – other than ‘move to Spain’ – warmly, if damply, welcomed.

*We were wrong

Slave Labour

So the other half comes back from his day helping out at the local nature reserve, and I want to know all about it. One of his duties, he reveals, is ‘ensuring there’s a good turnover of coffee in the coffee pot’ so there’s always something fresh for the visitors.
‘You mean it’s your job to drink coffee all day?’ I ask.
‘Well it’s not all sitting around drinking coffee, I also got to feed the ducks.’

Voluntary work: it’s a dirty rotten job, but somebody’s got to do it.