Blowhard

I was wondering if I was going to get out on the bike this morning, what with today being the day for this week’s gale, and twitter being all of a twitter about 100mph winds without even so much as an amusing hashtag to suggest it wasn’t that serious. The police were warning motorists to stay at home but they didn’t say anything about cyclists so when the rain stopped and the sky cleared, even though it was still (as they say) blowing a hooly, I decided to risk it. I actually quite enjoy cycling through high winds as long as I’m on quiet back roads, and I reasoned that any trees that were thinking of falling over this winter must surely have done so by now. Out I went for an exhilarating and invigorating ride (8mph on the way out, 12.5 on the way back) and came back just as the weather got really grim feeling pretty pleased with myself.

It wasn’t till the other half ventured out to Tesco and returned that we realised that there were three trees down between here and Bigtown. Clearly some of our local trees have been just hanging on and hoping for spring – but couldn’t quite hold out any longer.

I’m beginning to know how they feel.

Blown Away

Well, the BBC Terror Centre, as Huttonian (who is back blogging again, go and say hello, he needs cheering up) likes to call it, has been busy these last two days warning us of hurricane strength winds, although in the end delivering a not-quite-hurricane-strength but still-pretty-bloody-stiffish south-westerly. I’m not complaining, mind: it was stiffish enough that I spent most of the ride down to the papershop today giving the indifferent sheep my mime-artist style ‘cyclist attempting not to go backwards even on the downhill stretches’.

On the plus side, this did mean I sailed home on a tailwind – at least until I made the turn out of Nearest Village and into our road and got hit by a gust of crosswind that not only sent me sideways across the road but also gave me the uneasy feeling of my wheels skittering out from under me in the teeth of the blast.

I stayed rubber side down this time, but clearly I’m going to need to take on more ballast for the ride. More cake, maybe?

Brace Yourself

For surely the end times are a’coming.

I headed out for the paper this morning in what I hoped would prove to be a window in the weather long enough for me to make the 11 mile round trip. In truth, by the time I’d found my keys and my bag and responded to one last email and a couple of tweets, the rain had started, but a look at raintoday suggested it would be no more than a passing shower, and that what was coming in from the north west would be much worse. I did, at least, put on the waterproof trousers, and, of course, the everything-bar-the-apocalypse-proof jacket. Thus protected, I set out into a biting headwind (mourning the loss of my waxed cap which has kept my head dry and warm ever since I moved up here – anyone know where I can get another one?). At first it wasn’t too bad, a bit blowy, but only spitting. That was just the warm up though – the rain got heavier and heavier and the wind picked up and by the time I’d got through Nearest Village and was out of the shelter of any trees, it was just flinging handfuls of water into my face so hard that it stung.

This was not a good time for the tractor driver who came up behind me to to hoot at me to remind me that his important business (turning onto Big A-Road to hold up everyone else, it transpired) was more important than my important business (it probably was but he was in a nice dry cab and I didn’t see why I should stop just because he wasn’t able to pass me). But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was getting home, unzipping my jacket and discovering that the rain had finally soaked through it to the point where it was weighed down with accumulated water. As the jacket is rated for 15,000mm of rain per 24h, or, basically, Noah’s flood, this means either its waterproofing has failed (I hope not, after only just over a year, given the amount I paid for it) or that the end of the world is nigh

Given the weather we’ve had since I got home, I’m guessing the latter.

Blown Away

‘Do you think the tree is going to be all right blowing like that in this wind?’ the other half asked me at some point yesterday afternoon.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘It’s pretty sturdy, and besides birch are fairly bendy. It’s the ones that don’t bend that you have to worry about.’

‘Plenty of birches come down in the back woods though,’ the other half said.

‘Yeah, but they’re all thin and top-heavy. This one will be fine.’

Which just goes to show how much I know about trees.

‘Um, look at the tree now,’ the other half said a few hours later

An entire day of high gusting winds, rain and saturated ground had half uprooted the tree, leaving it finely balanced, but rocking with every gust. While the other half – a man with his priorities right – went to rescue his bird feeder, I rang the landlord and we stood and watched it for another hour not quite falling and not quite not falling until a man came with a chainsaw and put it out of its misery.

It could have been a lot worse. The tree managed to fall between the woodshed and the road, missing the telephone wire, our car, the house, the cat and any passing people on the road. The part of the garden it mostly landed on was the part that was getting a bit out of hand, and now I feel that at least I didn’t waste too much time weeding that end of the flowerbed. If it had been anywhere else, we might have had a go at righting it – sometimes they will just re-seat themselves, none the worse for wear – but we just couldn’t risk it that close to the road. And it was ‘only’ a birch tree, not an ancient, magnificent oak or beech, something worth making an effort to save.

But all the same, a tree is a tree is a tree and I do feel bad now for enjoying the wind so much earlier. And extra light or no extra light, I feel the view from our kitchen window this morning is rather diminished by its loss.

Although, looking on the bright side, that is quite a lot of firewood…

BDHW*

Brrr. As predicted with much excitement by what Huttonian likes to call the BBC Terror Centre, the wind has shifted around from our prevailing south and south-westerlies to the north. (A cold snap – in November! – who would ever have thought it?) But anyway, the point is, it managed to do the shift during the five minutes today that I was exchanging pleasantries in the papershop.

No prizes for guessing the prevailing direction of my ride into – and home from – the shop. Suffice it to say, that I’ve never come to a standstill going downhill before…

*Bi-directional head wind

All Bluster

You know it’s going to be an exciting ride when even the birds are going sideways…

Today was a wild one. I’ve dealt with headwinds before, but this was more than that, a twisting blustery wind that lay in wait behind hedges and dykes and pounced out through the gaps and round corners. One moment I’d be going forwards, the next sideways, the next struggling to make any progress at all. At one point – inching my way up a hill into the teeth of it – I was seriously wondering why I was doing this on a bike and not in a nice enclosed car. But then I turned the corner into a sheltered spot as the gradient eased and the sun came out and it was just me and the bike on an empty road, sailing along through the hills. Bliss. And besides, I was the warmest I had been for days.

Coming back was an exhilarating roller coaster ride, the kind that made me wish I had a speedo on my bike, not to mention better brakes. And then I encountered my first truly thoughtless driver in months. It was a long straight section of road, downhill, the wind at my back and I was cruising, but she was going faster. The first I knew of it was when a bolt of bright blue streaked past an inch from my handlebar and then she was past with no more than a guilty glance in her rear view mirror* to acknowledge that I was there at all. One unruly gust of wind and I could have been under her wheels or, worse, scratching her shiny paintwork.

This is the kind of near-miss, nobody-hurt, nothing-to-see-here-move-along encounter with drivers I used to have all the time in London, but out here things happen at higher speeds and anyway I’m not used to them any more. Still, as the other half unsympathetically said when I got home, it gives you something to blog about.

* here’s hoping she can’t lip read. Or maybe that she can