Caution Safety Chickens at Work

I was cycling back with the paper the other day when I heard the unmistakeable note of a car winding up to overtake me. As it was a bit of a twisty narrow section of road on the approach to nearest village, I held my line until I got to the entrance to the village where the road widens out enough to allow a driver to pass. It was just at that moment that I saw the two safety hens were out, with one of them ever so slowly beginning to make her way across the road. I signalled to the car behind that perhaps it might not want to overtake me after all (what is the international signal for a chicken crossing ahead? Possibly something Peter Sagan might do crossing the finish line…) and then both car and I waited while the bird walked meditatively across the road, inspecting the surface every now and then for interesting things to eat. Given that the car was a hatchback with two youngish lads in it (by then making chicken noises at her out the window, but refraining from attempting to run her down) this was impressive stuff.

It would be even more impressive if there were still three safety chickens, rather than the two that remain, but you can’t have everything. Now all we need to do is roll the safety chicken programme out nationwide, and I can stop organising monster cycle demonstrations and go back to pottering in my garden and inspecting the ford, where there have been developments.

The Ride of Shame

It’s been a while since I last had to slowly retrace my steps on a bike, looking for an errant phone – six months in fact, which must be some sort of a record – but a brief bike ride with my mother this morning ended up doubled as I got back and realised my phone wasn’t in my pocket any more.* The phone was found but it had obviously been dropped one time too many and this time the screen is partially borked making it very difficult to use it to keep up with twitter and check my emails, let alone take photographs, or send text messages. I think it still rings and makes calls but who actually uses their phone for that these days?

I shall go through the motions of attempting to get it fixed but not with any real hope of success. Time for the trip of shame down to the phone shop for another doomed gadget, with apologies to the planet – unless anyone’s got a phone they want rid of? I’d say it would be going to a good home, but that would be a lie…

*If you’re planning on saving money by riding a bike, you really need to factor in the toll it takes on dropped shiny toys – or get yourself some zip up pockets and actually zip them up. Something which I seem to be entirely incapable of…

Adventures in Cycling

So I’ve been trying to spread the word about Pedal on Parliament, including getting some of our flyers out to whereever cyclists hang out around here. Today, it being a niceish day – adjusted for our new weather realities – I decided to go on a bit of a departure from my well-worn groove between here and the papershop and here and Bigtown and strike off across country to the local mountain biking place where there was a cafe and bike hire centre and then onwards to a cafe and farm shop popular with the CTC* crowd. Someone on Facebook had suggested a nifty shortcut through the forest which avoided an unpleasant stretch of A road and so I set off with a song in my heart and a sandwich and stash of leaflets in my panniers.

Top tip for leaflet distributors: don’t accept route advice (or sweeties) from strangers.

Nifty shortcut turned out to involve not just a bastard big hill (which, in fairness, I had been warned about) but a road recently resurfaced with masses of loose gravel. I love my bike dearly, but neither it, nor I, are equipped for going uphill (or stopping downhill) on a surface of pointy rocks. However, I plugged up with a mixture of pedalling and pushing, rode down like a wuss on my brakes, found the extremely welcome ‘shortcut to cafe’ sign and pressed on, visions of coffee and tray bakes dancing in my head.

Second top tip for leaflet distributors: check on the internet whether the place you’re going to is open before setting off.

Still nothing daunted, and glad I’d had the foresight to pack a sandwich, I consulted the map for a route that avoided the Bastard Big Gravelly Hill, and found I had a choice between an even bigger Bastard Big Hill, or to go on the A road which avoided the worst climb, but which in the event was probably more unpleasant being both fast and narrow enough that when the cars decided to pass me when there was something coming the other way, there wasn’t much room for any wobbling and you just had to trust that the person behind you was neither homicidal nor had forgotten they were towing a trailer (that said, the closest pass I got all day – close enough that if the passenger’s window had been open I could probably have reached in and picked the driver’s pocket – was on a narrow back road where the driver of an ancient campervan decided that hanging on for another 30 seconds until I got to a farm gate where there would be room to pass was 30 seconds TOO LONG and he HAD TO PASS THE CYCLIST NOW. This was especially galling as he then got held up on the way down the hill by an oncoming van and, had I not been worried about my hat coming off in a stiffish headwind, I could have caught him up and explained to him the error of his ways. In retrospect it’s probably good I didn’t)

Pedal on Parliament flyers

Fortunately the second place was open and happy to take my flyers (and who wouldn’t be, they’ve got a PANDA on them. And a BABY PANDA. On a BROMPTON) and I set off for home with legs that now felt as if someone had filled my boots with lead. It turns out that riding my regular flattish 11 or 16 miles here and there day after day does nothing to prepare you for an epic day of going up and down unneccessary hills in a permanent headwind, even if the total miles ridden wasn’t much more than I’d do in total on a poorly planned day. And that’s why there are no pictures – I very quickly reached the stage where if I stopped pedalling I wasn’t sure I’d be able to start again

Still, it was good to get off the beaten track for a change. And it was a useful reminder (at least the A road bit) just why it’s so important that we get some proper cycling infrastructure in Scotland so that we don’t have to choose between Bastard Big Hills on back roads and being half blown off the bike by the wake from a speeding timber lorry on the main ones. Oh, and if the Scottish Government wanted to invest in one of these … I can suggest a few places where they can put it.

*Cafe-to-cafe

Cat on a Hot Tin Rayburn

Happiness is…

… your own stool by the Rayburn

In the interests of strict accuracy, that is supposed to be MY stool by the Rayburn but we’re cat sitting again and the cat and I have been conducting an undeclared turf war over this prime bit of kitchen territory. I think the cat’s won though, as MY stool has had to be moved from a position where I could sit with my back against the Rayburn because the cat had a tendency to fall asleep on it and then stretch luxuriously on waking, pressing her paws against the hot metal. It turns out it takes a little bit of time for the message that your paws are burning to get through to a cat brain (although when it does, boy the cat can move). We wouldn’t want her damaging herself under our care, so we have moved the stool to a safe stretching distance and if that inconveniences anyone else in the house well, she’s a cat, and she doesn’t give a stuff, frankly.

Someone remind me what cats are for again?

Bad News on the Chicken Front

Hmm, I might have to revise my policy on the nationwide roll out of safety chickens to rural villages for traffic calming purposes. Cycling back with the paper the other day I spotted a mound of bright russet feathers and thought I had another pheasant for the Splatter Project but it turned out to be one of the hens from the Cottage that Used to Sell Eggs, still warm, but definitely dead. There’s nothing like standing outside someone’s door listening to them practising the cello inside, trying to gauge the best moment to knock and ruin their day, although at least it turns out that losing a hen to careless drivers isn’t quite as devastating as losing a cat.

As it happens, it wasn’t one of the safety chickens, for that cottage lies well outside the village and technically in a 60mph zone, though if you actually did more than 60mph on that road you’d kill more than chickens. That said, the last few times I’ve been through the village, it would appear we’re down to just the one hen – and the cottage on the corner has had a large lump taken out of it, apparently by lorry. It would appear we’re going to need something more substantial than just a few birds for perfect rural road safety.

And we’d better come up with something soon, because the first ickle lambs have started appearing in the fields and it’s usually only days after that they first start appearing on the roads…

Top Tips for Rural Drivers

When you’re accelerating hard at that puddle on the road – you might want to at least pretend to look out for any innocent gardeners who are busy working on the other side of the wall having been foolishly lured out by eleven days* of unprecedented dry weather and actual sunshine and having forgotten temporarily about the perma-puddle on the other side of the wall. Because, even though it was actually getting warm enough in the sun and out of the wind for me to at least consider shedding one of my many layers May be out be damned, I wasn’t quite ready for a cooling shower of muddy road water.

Just so you know.

Meanwhile, enjoy the picture of the snowdrop harvest being brought in – I can’t help feeling that the quad bike should probably have been driven by the Queen of the May, rather than a burly bloke with a buzz cut, but you can’t have everything.

*and counting

Ain’t Nobody Here but us Chickens

Nearest Village’s generally deserted streets have been enlivened in recent weeks by three nice friendly brown hens, who wander around it freely, sometimes on the verge, sometimes in the road – folk do like their chickens *very* free range round here. A local building project, plus some forestry means there’s a fair few lorries coming through the village at the moment on their way to and from the Big A Road, so you’d expect they’d not be long for this world – but we already know that trucks brake for poultry, so maybe their owners are onto something. As a traffic calming device, a couple of hens are a lot cheaper than speedbumps, and more replaceable than children, with the added advantage over either of laying eggs.

In fact, now I come to think of it, the question is not ‘why are there hens roaming the streets of Nearest Village?’ but ‘why doesn’t every village have them?’

Joking Apart

On my ride down for the paper today I saw not just our old friend ASBO Buzzard, busy chasing off an interloping red kite from its territory, but a beautiful male kestrel who was working his way up the road in front of me, ready to pick off any voles or mice that dashed out of the long grass and onto the road. And last night, out in a car for once, we saw a young deer slinking off into the woods – and a badger loping along the verge, both thankfully keeping well out of traffic (‘I’m glad we didn’t hit him,’ my companion said of the badger. ‘They can do a lot of damage to the car…’)

So while I’m all for science – and I shall still be keeping my eyes peeled for squished critters – I’m quite glad to report another non-result for the Splatter Project today. Long may it continue (although a few pheasants probably wouldn’t be too terribly missed…)

Speaking of Minor Deities…

… it would appear we’ve had a visit from the tarmac fairy!

I’ve never seen this mysterious being at work so I suspect she may operate under cover of darkness.* This may explain her rather capricious approach to her job… after all why else would you mend one pothole and leave another one completely untouched?

Or just put a blob of tarmac down in the middle of a pothole and leave the edges open?

Or perhaps tarmac is being rationed? The fresh tarmac is the blob in the top right hand corner. The rest is basically stream bed. If I’m going to come off my bike, this is the spot where it will happen, I always feel. Do Schwalbe make tyres that deal with that?

Heh. Well I can’t quite believe I not only went out and took all those photos of badly mended potholes (I’m on the community council now, so I’ve got an excuse to get obsessive about road repairs) but actually made you sit through a whole blog post about it (and not for the first time, either). For those of you still reading, here’s a bonus photograph to compensate

Cute – or delicious – depending on your point of view

*Cynics say that she is in fact a council bloke shovelling tarmac off the back of a lorry as it goes along – but these are the sort of people who deny that Santa Claus exists.

Cabin Fever

It’s that time of the year when I have to remind myself that we chose to move to a beautiful but not particularly thickly populated part of the world, and that for 90% of the year that means we get to enjoy our beautiful and beautifully empty rural roads. In particular, we chose a house fairly well off the beaten track, five miles from the nearest shop, eight miles from the nearest town and we reap the full benefit of that in terms of peace and quiet (broken only by the odd fighter-jet skirmish and random sheep invasions), dark and sparkly night skies, hot and cold running red squirrels, views and all the other joys of rural life. In return, we have to remember that nobody’s going to actually grit, let alone plough, every tiny little single-track road, just because some people were foolish enough to live along them.

Which is why, during the other 10% (or so) of the year, I just have to grin and bear the fact that the only reasonable way of getting around at the moment is by car. Never mind cycling – we took a walk down to check the level of the ford (about 2 inches, not frozen yet) and the road alternated between solid ice, crunchy snow on top of ice, black ice, running water, ice on top of snow and the odd stretch of dry clear tarmac: even on two feet, it was pretty dicey. Actually, even getting out of our front door is pretty dicey, although we have bought some grit and treated enough of the yard that we can get to our various sheds, and the car, without risking a broken neck. It’s frustrating when I’m used to being able to get myself most places by bike, or on foot. Nor can I get out on the bike to clear my head or, more importantly, work off the extra couple of slices of buttered toast that seemed like a sensible accompaniment to coffee. Instead, either I arrange a lift somewhere or I just don’t go at all. Nor can I work off the energy in the garden because half the beds are iced over with frozen snow and besides there’s nothing useful to be done.

Thanks to encouragement here and elsewhere, plans are afoot for a set of winter wheels with studded tyres (I couldn’t quite persuade myself I needed a whole winter bike …). Until then, I’ll just have to remember that it won’t actually kill me not to cycle for a week or two, strange as that might seem. I might be a little grumpy but it’s better than being in traction. And we’ll be off to sunnier, if not exactly warmer, climes for Christmas fairly soon so I should be back and pedalling before I go too far insane. Well, any insaner than I already was…