But it’s not just the farmers, and it’s not just people who know each other either. If the county also had a motto it would be ‘there are no strangers, just people who you’re about to discover used to live next door to your old head teacher’ or some such connection. A recent writing exercise invited me to observe what people were reading in public and from that imagine their inner lives and write them a brief back story. Hah. Whoever invented that did not live around here, that’s clear. Even were you to find someone actually reading in public, a bus in Bigtown is treated as a chance to make the acquaintance of your fellow passengers and discover how they might be related to you and your world, in order to enjoy a nice wee blether to speed the journey along. A twenty-minute bus journey would therefore likely furnish you with their entire real life story, in more detail than you ever really needed.

Normally I tend to just keep quiet and listen but the Brompton is a great ice breaker, especially once it’s launched itself off the luggage rack onto someone’s feet, so on my bus trip to catch the train to Edinburgh last weekend I found myself part of the general conversation. We touched on on the best way to keep the bike in place (wedge it in with my bag), whether or not it was a handy wee thing (it was, obviously), the general dreadfulness of the weather (dreadful), lateness of the bus (shocking) and it was only lack of time that kept us from the price of fish and whether any of my friends or relations had any remote connection to my fellow passengers. ‘Bye for now,’ said one of my new best friends as she got off the bus, as if we would soon be reunited to continue our conversation.

Indeed, knowing the way things work around here, she was probably right.

Better late than never

(sorry about the phone quality snaps. Guess whose camera waited until the extended warranty had expired to finally and definitively give up the ghost. How do they know?)

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.

Of course, it didn’t happen. There was one point when I looked round the Meadows and saw that the line of people stretching out waiting to start the ride not only went round the corner as it had done last year, but disappeared right out of sight. One feeder ride from an Edinburgh suburb had 160 people on it. And our t-shirts – our only real fundraiser, apart from two generous donations from CTC Scotland and Andrew Cyclist – went so quickly that when one of the marshalls dashed over to pick up a t-shirt for Graeme Obree there were none left. There was only one thing for it. Thankful that it had been cold enough for me to have a nice merino baselayer underneath – and that it wasn’t one of the ones the moths had got at – I sacrificed mine. It’s not often you get to share clothes with a genuine legend of cycling.

Last year, I was at the front of the ride, leading the charge down the cobbles of the royal Mile. This time I was right at the back with an empty cargo bike, a very relieved deputy chief marshal, a marshal dressed as a panda and the last of the riders: a woman, and her little girl who was determinedly pedalling her tiny bike as fast as her legs would go, an expression of fierce concentration on her face. I asked her if she was having fun and she gave a huge nod that almost unseated her, still concentrating hard. I saw later on twitter that the police escorted her safely the whole way before finally opening the roads back up to the cars. I expect that yesterday was a day she will remember her entire life.

This little one was the last person at the pedal on parliament 2 #keepingpeoplesafe http://t.co/BTQlssDgyq—
EdinburghCityPolice (@EdinCityPolice) May 19, 2013

I hope that when she does look back at it, she can tell her grandchildren that she was there at the moment when cycling changed in Scotland for the better.

*’this isn’t rain it’s just haar’, someone said. People of Edinburgh, if there is water falling out of the sky it is raining. Rain isn’t just something we have on the west coast you know.

2. three months later, somehow manage to help assemble 3000 people and their bikes in one of the biggest protests ever outside the new Scottish Parliament

3. some months later, realise that while the government has told you you’re ‘pushing on an open door’ in asking for safer cycling, they have neglected to mention that the door is in fact marked ‘pull’ and they’re actually going to do the square root of bugger all to achieve their own target for 10% of journeys by bike and that you’re going to have to do it all again.

4. Spend the next weeks and months sending and receiving many thousands of emails and tweets and living, breathing and sleeping the planning of the protest

5. with just a few days to go, unwisely put your mobile phone number on the press release announcing the support of one of Britain’s greatest Olympians, briefly propelling your protest to the top of the news agenda.

6. field a call from a charming sounding and very persuasive BBC radio producer and rashly agree to appear live on Good Morning Scotland the next morning, which will entail getting up at 6am

7. come back from a rare evening out to the usual dozens of emails and stay up far too late reading them despite an early start the next day.

8. finally get to bed and fall into a fitful dream in which for some reason you are debating cycling policy with Nigel Farage

9. Wake up at 3am and spend the next hour lying awake furiously arguing in your head with an imagined Nigel Farage until you have comprehensively and completely rebutted all of his (imagined) points with statistics. And footnotes.

10. For variety, spend the next hour worrying about not getting back to sleep interspersed with thinking up several more telling rebuttals for Mr. Imaginary Farage. Finally fall asleep with the daylight creeping through the curtains and the wakey-wakey bird in full flow.

11. Half an hour later, get up.

Needless to say I didn’t have to debate cycling policy with Nigel Farage (if only because he’d already hung up in a strop), I got two easy questions which I could answer with ease (and statistics), and the whole interview lasted mere seconds. By 8:45 I was free to cycle home in the (finally) spring sunshine, incredibly relieved.

Of course, it’s not over yet and there’s still an enormous amount to do, but at least I don’t have to do it live on radio (and thank God I wasn’t the one who ended up doing the call-in show). I hope that any of you who can will be joining us and many many many other cyclists in Edinburgh on Sunday – everybody welcome, even Mr Farage (although I suggest he come dressed as a panda by way of disguise). And then I’ll be coming home and filling you in with an exciting update about the ford and news of the safety chickens in action.

I’ll say something for a damp spring and an all-pervasive grey sky: it certainly makes all the spring greenery pop. My new-to-me phone camera doesn’t really do it justice but although the wind is icy and the sun is elusive, the greens are GREEN. Every blade of grass catches the light and shimmers in the wind and the fields just seem to glow with lush growth. The hedgerow flowers haven’t really started yet, and the bluebell woods are yet to come, but if you want verdure, we’ve got it.

It was a miserable afternoon but the turnout was pretty good and the plant selection was wide if a little random. There was a very knowledgeable gardener manning the stall which was helpful as nothing was in flower and despite working for over a decade at Kew Gardens, my plant identification skills have not advanced much beyond ‘legume’ and ‘not a legume’. As the prices ranged the gamut from 50p to £1.50 it didn’t really matter what I bought anyway. The good thing about these sales is that people mostly donate plants that have grown well and spread themselves in their gardens so you know that most things will do well in the prevailing conditions. This is also the bad thing about these sales – one punter did sail off with a tray full of Lady’s Mantle which spreads itself like wildfire, despite even the woman manning the stall trying to dissuade her. Still, one person’s invasive nightmare is another person’s useful ground cover and as long as there isn’t too much ground elder and bindweed root lurking in the pots I should end up ahead on points.

So here’s my booty – whatever it is. I’d have bought a lot more but the Brompton basket was getting quite full and I had to leave room for the home baking. Plant stall lady did tell me what most of them were but my brain refused to retain the information – it can’t remember people’s names, why on earth would it manage with plants? One of them is a shrub with berries that blackbirds like. Two of them are ‘special’ foxgloves, reason for specialness not entirely clear. One flowers in July, which is useful and was described as a ‘really good doer’. One had other sterling qualities that seemed enticing at the time but which I have now forgotten. And one of them was a mystery both to me and Plant stall lady, but at 50p was worth a punt. Waiting to see what emerges is half the fun…

* you’ve got to be quick: theoretically it started at 2:30 but I knew all too well that the people bringing plants arrive earlier and get first dibs of the good stuff, so I was there by 2:15 and it was already heaving. They just don’t do fashionably late around here.

But then the neighbour got ill and had to go and stay with his parents to recover, taking the cat with him and leaving a cat-shaped hole in our lives. It’s good news for swallows, I suppose, and hopefully she’ll be back before the mice get wind of it, but it’s left us feeling a little bereft.

Although I was slightly cheered by the sight of a red squirrel bounding past the kitchen window early one morning. OK, so they won’t come and curl up on the sofa to be stroked, but they are pretty damn cute all the same.

There are some things I won’t do, however. I have never on my life been on any sort of diet and I refuse to start now. I’m quite happy to stop eating snacks between meals or not have pudding or go from two slices of toast to just one, as long as someone is around to eat the other one* but I’m buggered if I’m going to start finding out how many calories there are in something, or switch to low fat or sugar free anything. And while the entire internet appears to be on the 5-2 diet, I’m not sure the world is ready for the sort of grumpiness I’m likely to display when I’m fasting. However, cutting out the odd snack and pudding can only go so far, which means if I’m to achieve my goal of getting back into my black jeans without holding onto the waistband and jumping up and down I have to adjust the energy out side of the equation.

Now I already cycle quite a lot, but cycling is actually not a great way to burn calories as it’s too darn efficient, especially at the speed I normally go. And when it comes to getting into jeans, cycling suffers from the whole thunder thighs issue, something that never gets covered on those cycle chic blogs. No, the only way I’ve found to actually lose weight is either to run or to walk more. I’m not *quite* desperate enough to go back to the running, but I am trying to get out on two feet as well as two wheels as much as I can.

For the last few weeks, therefore, I’ve aimed to do at least one hour of either walking or cycling every day and so far I’ve stuck to it. I’ve even switched to occasionally walking to the village instead of cycling to get my allotted hour in. The results haven’t been exactly spectactular, but I’m gradually shedding the excess, although that might just be our bathroom scales. I haven’t yet tried getting into the jeans, but it’s only a matter of time. The only problem so far has been fending off all the offers of lifts from people in the village – walking for transport is even odder than cycling round here. I might have to borrow a dog before I get picked up by the police for soliciting…

*people who switch the toaster to the one slice setting and LEAVE IT THERE get shot at dawn in our household. Just so you know.

There was a brief moment – Tuesday, to be exact – when it was positively warm out there. We took the bikes and did the suicide papershop run, past the when-I-win-the-lottery ruined mill which is has tantalisingly been for sale for ages now, down through the beech woods with the first fuzz of green just furring the branches of the trees. Not only did I have to relinquish the merino, I was even too warm in my lighter summer trousers, although I drew the line at shorts (we’re trying to eschew the hi-vis round here, which rules out my legs). We sat in the sun and ate ice creams and then pedalled back at a leisurely pace with the wind at our backs and there wasn’t anywhere on earth that we would rather have been. Since then the rain has returned and we’ve been suffering the consequences of rashly not getting the Rayburn relit and it’s been back to not just the thermal baselayer, but two jumpers and the sneaking feeling that, ridiculous though it would be in May, it would be more comfortable to keep my fleece on indoors…

However. We also noticed yesterday that suddenly green is everywhere, the hedgerows are starting to blossom (no sign of the May yet, of course), the birds are most definitely singing and the bindweed has started to emerge. The latter means the soil has definitely warmed up – and also means that I am, as ever, behind in my gardening.

I shall just have to catch up when this is over. Ten more days…