Pedal Power

We interrupt this train- and car-related content with a welcome return to some cycling subject matter, albeit vicariously. I was delighted to get an advance copy of Laura Laker’s book on the NCN (aka the notional cycle network among the less charitably inclined) and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it so far.

Ooh look what's just arrived! Proper looking forward to this @laura_laker @BloomsburySport pic.twitter.com/2jLHuee2mA

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) April 29, 2024

Like most UK cyclists I have something of a love-hate relationship with Sustrans’s most famous creation and the book captures extremely well the mixture of joy and frustration that can be involved in riding all but the very best bits of it (with or without a pot plant in your front basket).

As a writer she’s enjoyable company but even one as entertaining as Laura would be hard pressed to get a whole book out of ‘and then I had to negotiate yet another A-barrier, got lost navigating a tortuous back-street route out of town and bumped three miles down a muddy goat track which ended in a flight of steps’ (although there’s plenty of that)and she’s also gone into the whole history of how Sustrans began, and how the network was built. The book navigates the delicate line involved in acknowledging the massive – and inspiring – efforts of the original motley crew who got the whole thing off the ground, while being clear-eyed about the madness that means a major piece of transport infrastructure in this country was put together effectively by amateurs working for a charity – rather as if our rail network had been left to the people who restore heritage railways and run steam trains for tourists during holiday weekends (that said, they might well do a better job …).

For those of us who spend far too long on Cycling Twitter (or who are in at the deep end of local campaigning) there will be much to recognise here and many familiar names popping up here and there as Laura attempts to navigate around Great Britain by the aid of those little disappearing blue stickers alone (and having had to be rescued by a passing cyclist when I got lost doing something similar on a smaller scale, I can definitely relate). But the book should also be eye opening to those who aren’t deep in that world. I hope it gets into the hands of people up and down the country who can make a difference.

Meanwhile, having read about how Sustrans grew from the tiny acorn of a local cycle campaign group in Bristol, it’s reinforced my own determination to keep campaigning – and given me some hope that we might be able to make a difference locally too. Indeed, we’re already attempting to do so through our Missing Links book (and if you wanted to chip in to our crowdfunder you’ve got another two weeks to do so). It won’t on its own build a cycling network in Bigtown – but then again, the good folk who built the Bristol-Bath railway path that started the whole thing, didn’t know they would end up building a national network either. Little acorns, mighty oaks – you never know.

Going Electric

Don’t get excited – I know what you’re thinking – but this is not a post about me getting an e-bike (yet). Instead, the week started with the not unexpected news that our faithful 16-year-old Peugeot, affectionately known as the little blue tractor, wasn’t going to get through its MOT without expensive and possibly futile surgery. By Monday afternoon we’d started researching the possibility of getting an EV to replace it – thinking we’d only really be able to afford one that was a few years old – and by Tuesday morning we’d found half a dozen effectively brand new (pre-registered 2024 models) electric Peugeots on sale in Ayr. Cue an unexpected outing to the seaside (Ayr has a lovely beach, who knew?) and by Wednesday afternoon we were effectively the owners of a 2024 Peugeot e208 with about 10 miles on the clock – it was just a question of waiting for it to be charged up enough so we could get it home.

We’ve hummed and hahed about getting an electric car in the past – the main issue at the time being our regular trips to see the Pepperpots in Duns, a round trip of about 200 miles, with no handy fast charging points along the way. Now that the Pepperpots are in Bigtown that problem has gone, and most of our car trips are short enough that we won’t need to worry about the range, even in cold weather. Of course, that’s all predicated on us having a home charger; the next few weeks may well be dominated by the hunt for handy charging spaces until we’ve got one installed or at the very least got hold of the right kind of cable so we can charge in from a standard socket. We may well be spending a fair bit of time in the local garden centre coffee shop, but there are worse fates.

Meanwhile the car has been on two outings so far and it’s very nice and shiny and sleek. It suffers slightly from the reverse-Tardis effect of all new cars these days in that it manages to be bigger on the outside than our old 207, yet somehow smaller on the inside. And for someone whose heart sinks at the words ‘you’ll need to download our app’ there seem to be a distressing number of apps involved in running an electric vehicle, but I’m letting the other half deal with that side of things. The main thing is it’s not an SUV (hard to avoid in these benighted times) and it is lovely and quiet, almost eerily so. Hopefully it will give us as long and (mostly) reliable service as its predecessor did. So maybe not quite as exciting as a new bike, but still quite satisfying a purchase as these things go.

Overlander…

Well, we’re back (and as is the way with all holidays, it already feels as if it was a long time ago, especially as I made the decision to travel without my laptop so came back to All the Work I’d postponed until after the holiday – which is an improvement on past holidays when I’ve spent a goodly part of the time actually working).

It was a fantastic trip, and I have to say that Pompeii was everything I’d hoped for and more, while Herculaneum was a little gem and I wish we’d allowed more time for it (if I was doing it over, I wouldn’t bother with going up Vesuvius but have more time in Herculaneum instead). There’s not much I can say about either that will add to what the real experts will tell you. If you’re thinking of going, all I can say read up beforehand, pace yourself (especially Pompeii, it’s enormous), and the later in the day you can stay, the better (the site stays open for an hour or so after official closing time and the worst of the crowds quickly evaporate once the gates close).

I’m glad we went in April and not high summer (it was already hot enough, and very crowded – I can’t imagine what high season might be like) especially as the wild flowers were blooming everywhere. I hadn’t realised that as well as the houses, you can get a sense of what the gardens might have been like, and some of them are wonderful (the other half was getting a bit alarmed at my finding garden inspiration from grand Roman villas … possibly not the most achievable of goals in our damp climate).

And it was nice to be touristing in a place where you knew you weren’t ruining the lives of the locals, if only because their lives had already been fairly comprehensively ruined almost 2000 years ago (with the exception of the inevitable – and magnificently indifferent – feline residents)

As for the travel – and I know most of you are only here for the detailed train timetables, if you’re on Twitter, you may have already followed along on our adventures

Right. We're off. What have I forgotten? #BigtownToPompeii

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) April 10, 2024

We took three days each way to do the travelling – Train to Carlisle, train to Newcastle, overnight ferry to Amsterdam, overnight sleeper to Innsbruck, train to Bologna, train to Naples, and then local trains to and from our accommodation (a wonderful room in an old house in an incredible garden – more gardening goals, see below) and the various sites of interest. I’m pleased to have done the whole trip by sustainable modes of transport apart from driving to and from the station from home, and one emergency taxi to Naples on our way back, after the train we were on broke down and apparently took the entire local line with it.

The way out was completely straightforward and almost uncannily trouble free. The way back – well, let’s just say I was glad I’d built a lot of contingency into our schedule, aforementioned emergency taxi journyes included. Unfortunately no amount of planning could do anything about the ferry crossing home, which was a bit blowy.

Crossing was a bit lively

(video shows a wave breaking over the bow of the ferry) pic.twitter.com/0ptUpQd8MI

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) April 20, 2024

I think it says more about my social media circles than society more widely that quite a few people had either recently completed a similar train journey or were in the middle of one during our trip. For everyone else – well, I think we’ve shown that it’s possible to do quite significant journeys by train in Europe if you want to, but, sadly, it would be disingenuous to suggest that it’s as easy, affordable or convenient as flying. There were an awful lot of moving parts involved and it was not a cheap holiday. On the other hand, we had the bonus of discovering Bologna and Innsbruck, and a chance to catch up with a pal in Amsterdam.

For me, because I no longer want to fly except for unavoidable family reasons, it was the only way I was going to get to Pompeii and it was worth it for the experience. And if you’re someone who likes travelling, likes trains and ferries, and likes stopping off and wandering around in random cities on the way, you’ll have a ball. As long as you’re all about the journey over the destination, it’s the way to go.

(and of course I couldn’t post this without a sop to my fellow kerb nerds, who I’m sure will appreciate this early Roman incarnation of a low-traffic neighbourhood).

Holiday Prep

So. We’re off on our holiday soon. It’s fair to say that this trip is a bit of a departure for us – pretty much all our holidays have been spent staying with family, which means very little planning other than booking flights. Our upcoming trip has been months in the planning which makes it sound as though we’re trekking overland across a continent rather than taking a few trains and a ferry but then again, I am a bit of an overthinker…

Phew. I _think_ I've now finally booked and printed all our reservation (train, bus, ferry) for our holiday next week. Thanks to @seatsixtyone for the valuable information on how to get from Scotland to Naples by (mostly) train

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) April 7, 2024

The whole genesis of the holiday came when I was reading something or other about Pompeii and thinking about how I’d wanted to see it as a child – and then realising I actually still did want to see it as an adult and what is more, it is still there to be seen. I also knew I didn’t want to fly there – love miles to the US are one thing, but I’ve sworn off short haul flights – so it was off to the Man in Seat 61 to find out whether getting there by train would be in any way practical.

Even with his sage advice, this has proved a bit of an endeavour – indeed the whole holiday is starting to feel more like a work project than anything else. It’s not just the travel side of things, but it does seem if you want to go and see a specific thing these days you really need to do your homework first. And I’ve also been speed reading Mary Beard’s book on Pompeii so I know more about what we’re looking at when we get there. Unfortunately this plus work pressures up until last week have meant that I’ve not had time to learn any Italian (I’m reminded of the time we went to Northern Greece to help take part in a warbler survey and I’d slightly overstated my ability to identify migrant birds by ear, so we spent the run up to the trip learning warbler calls instead of any Greek) so I’m hoping that a working knowledge of French and a bit of Spanish will be enough to get by.

Anyway, as of now – with a couple of days to go before the grand depart – I’m finally starting to feel I can tentatively look forward to the holiday. Every ticket that needs to be booked is booked, the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle being our seat reservations on the Deutsche Bahn train to Bologna, every ‘paperless’ reservation printed out (you can trust your phone battery to be alive and display the relevant ticket at the crucial moment if you want to). And the garden, crucially, is in safe hands, or rather paws

Looks like the garden will be in good hands… pic.twitter.com/5a4PJfcq6y

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) April 5, 2024

Meanwhile, if you’d like a weekend away in lovely Dumfries and Galloway, with minimal planning and maximum amounts of relaxed cycling during the late May Bank Holiday weekend (often the time of year when we have our ‘summer’) can I suggest you get yourself booked onto the KM Rally? Once run by the wiry old boys (and a few gals) in lycra of the local CTC group, it’s been handed over to a local village trust to take it forward. I’ve been helping out planning the routes, including a special family-friendly edition for those with kids or who just want short rides, and it’s shaping up to be a great deal of fun. There will be camping in the local church field, meals (and packed lunches) provided, and miles and miles of mostly empty albeit very potholed roads. There’s even a brand new cycle path to enjoy.

Something to look forward to on my return.

There’s Tatties in Them Thar Beds

It may not look that different from last week’s post, but behold, there has been gardening done.

A letup in the work schedule and a visiting gardening relative (a sprightly 79) gave me the the impetus to spend most of the dry weather we’ve had out in the garden, to good effect. Tatties planted, fruit trees planted, strawberries planted, and some bonus broad beans that were surplus to Mrs Pepperpot’s requirements have been chucked into the only other raised bed that was ready to receive anything (‘planted’ seems a strong word under the circumstances).

The corner of the garden where I experimented with lasagne gardening has been cleared of cardboard, as well as all (OK, some of) the roots I missed the last time round and my birthday Japanese maple has been planted and even mulched, to delight us with its foliage for many autumns to come (it will be visible from the kitchen window – there’s nothing like a pop of red to gladden the eye when you’re doing the washing up).

I’ve even had a go at upcycling (downcycling?) some torn jeans and a motheaten jumper into a hanging basket liner. If nothing else, it’s rocking the ‘weekend casual’ look. Whether it will mean more strawberries than its plastic lined pals, we’ll have to see.

The rest of the beds have been cleared of the encroaching tide of grass and hastily covered over with a pile of not very convincing compost from one of the daleks, in an attempt to hold back the forces of spring for a few more weeks until I’m ready to get more planting done.

Leave any part of our garden unattended for a couple of months and boom it's half way to a lawn. Dumfries and Galloway just wants to grow grass pic.twitter.com/3wJnAS1tn8

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) March 29, 2024

The reason for all this hasty gardening being that we’re off on holiday next week. It’s the first time in a decade that I won’t be up to my neck in POP preparations and I’m taking full advantage. We’re heading to Naples, by rail and sea (but not bicycle, to the other half’s relief). It’s been a feat of planning and preparation to get to the point where I’m almost ready to print out my two-page itinerary (I forebore to set up a spreadsheet). Just got to book our tickets to Vesuvius (you need to book in advance, who knew*?) and then we’re good to go.

More, much more, on our adventures on our return, assuming we are spared.

* Me, because I read the 400 one-star reviews on Trip Advisor from all the people who had only thought to go on Trip Advisor AFTER they’d turned up at the entrance to the National Park without booking and couldn’t get in. Personally, I think giving a not-yet-extinct volcano a one-star review is something of a bold move, but I’m grateful for the information so …

What is it That You Plan to Do with Your One Wild and Precious Life?

I realise that this blog is in danger of becoming increasingly infrequently updated, and then only with ‘sorry for the lack of posts’ posts – but I also realise that you’re all unlikely to be waiting with bated breath for my latest insights into my idyllic rural downshifted life of (checks notes) sitting at home working all day. However. The work pressures do appear to have eased, and I even managed an afternoon off last week on my birthday, which I immediately celebrated with a trip to the garden centre (I’m not even going to blame that on my advancing years – when I was seven we lived opposite a small garden centre and I loved spending my pocket money there).

Anyway, as I realised when I got home to another flurry of work emails with stupid deadlines, I have ended up not just with a load of lovely plants, as a to do list in vegetal form.

Today there was a rare alignment of no work, no rain and an hour or so off from the cycle campaigning so I started work on the horticultural backlog in an attempt to clear the raised beds so I can get my potatoes planted. An hour later, the rain had restarted and I was back at my desk trying to respond to the coonsil’s latest gaslighting email* in a way that wouldn’t get me on some sort of extremist watch list.

Meanwhile the potatoes remain unplanted.

And how is your spring going?

* Apparently a narrow footbridge where cycling is banned, leading to a one-in-five hill, counts as an ‘active travel route’ because the potential for conflict with traffic is very low, and yes I suppose hopping on and off your bike to cross a bridge and then powering up a steep slope is really quite active, but if you can explain to me how this meets their commitment to “prioritising non-motorised users and public transport” then answers on a postcard please.

Ripping One’s Knitting

A couple* of years ago, I started knitting a jumper out of some car boot wool which my cousin had found for me a couple* of years before that. Unfortunately, I didn’t really pay enough attention to the sizing in the pattern and it came out rather too wide and too short, even after I’d tried blocking it, so I never really wore it much even though it was lovely and warm. This seemed a shame, so after humming and hawing for a bit, I finally decided to bite the bullet and rip it up and start again, only this time choosing a smaller size (and also not being quite so impatient when deciding if it was long enough to start the armhole, which was the other problem). Obviously it would have been better to rethink the sizing this before I’d spent over a year knitting it, but one of the joys of knitting is its undoability so better late than never.

Of course nothing is ever quite as simple in the craft world. I’d chosen the pattern because, among other things, it barely required any sewing, with everything grafted together on the needles. This made getting started a bit interesting, at least until I remembered that the sleeves were the last to go in and so needed to be the first to be undone. After that I was away. It’s been a super busy few weeks, and it’s been nice to have a slightly mindless activity to keep my fingers busy in the little bits of downtime I have had – and I do like a bit of unravelling (I’m not alone, either, there’s a whole subreddit devoted to it).

Earlier this year I’d taken up knitting fingerless mitts, and triumphantly produced a very elaborate cabled pair for Mrs Pepperpot which she has – gratifyingly – barely taken off since. But, while mitts might be nice and quick to knit, combine them with cables and you end up with a project that you do have to focus on. So while this jumper mark two might take me a couple* of months to complete, at least I’ll be able to read the paper while I’m doing it.

And this time, hopefully, I’ll manage to spend more time wearing it than I’ve so far spent making it…

*five

I Don’t Have a Podcast …

… and don’t worry, I’m not about to start one now (I would imagine that an ability to listen to recordings of your own voice without wanting to cringe mightily would be a key requirement) but I am in someone else’s

🌳 Everyday Changemakers: Sally Hinchcliffe, Cycling Dumfries 🌳

Listen 👉: https://t.co/frDzNdTEJq

Dumfries series (Part 1/5): Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) talks to Kaska Hempel (@Edu_K) about a life-long quest for making cycling everyone’s natural choice to get around. pic.twitter.com/ft9qtMLG1l

— Scot Communities CAN (@ScotCCAN) March 5, 2024

You can find it here, along with interviews with lots of other people who are probably actually making real change across Scotland. I can’t tell you any more because I haven’t listened to it (see above) and I can’t remember what I said. But it was fun recording it and I was flattered to be asked.

In other news, we have new season sheep, which didn’t want to come near enough to be properly photographed in focus (but hey, lambs are fuzzy anyway).

Spring must be upon us soon.

Even More Pumped

Just over a year ago, we got a heat pump, the sort of news that ought to be incredibly dull, but which inevitably attracted the attention of the tedious trolls who like telling people they’re idiots because of the way they choose to heat their homes. At the risk of waking the anti-woke again, I thought I’d give you an equally dull anniversary update. I’ve even got a spreadsheet, although I’ll spare you that.

To summarise, one year after installation, our house is – despite everything the naysayers would have you believe – a) warm, b) quiet, and c) a good deal cheaper to heat than it was a year ago. Our electricity bill is down 15% year on year (I told you there was a spreadsheet) and even more significantly, we haven’t had to light the stove (even after we’d got the back boiler removed so it didn’t explode if we did), which is where we’ve enjoyed the real cost savings. This despite many frosty nights this winter – and some mornings so cold the car didn’t want to start. Also, the joy of a pressurised hot water tank means showers are no longer punctuated by cries of despair as the water pump decides to stop delivering hot water mid way through – no doubt good for our health, if the ice-bath brigade are to be believed, but not particularly good for morale.

For those looking for the small print – yes there’s a very faint whirring noise (mostly due to the central heating itself rather than the heatpump), we have the thermostat at 18C which we find is plenty warm but is still a two-jumpers level of warmth, rather than wandering-around-in-a-t-shirt temps. With both of us working from home, the slow-and-steady approach that makes a heatpump most efficient suits us well, but might not work for everyone. And we’ve discovered that our chimney has a leak, something that we hadn’t realised until we stopped drying it out with the heat from the stove (then again, finding this out before it had caused major damage might also count as an upside). And we’re frequently caught out by the fact that it is, in fact, cold outside, because it’s lovely and warm indoors.

None of this will convince the trolls of course, but that’s their loss – they can go on heating their houses by burning £50 notes or whatever the currently acceptable non-woke way to do so may be. For those that might be more persuadable, we’ve added ourselves as a case study in the Green Homes network, which hopefully will be a bit more of an effective way of answering people’s questions than the binfire of social media. I’ll still share this post on Twitter anyway, if only to find out if home heating is still such a contentious topic one year on, or if they’ve moved on to getting angry about something equally dull, like paperclips. Or, washing machine deliveries. Because you never really know what’s going to set folk off these days.

Falling Down on the Job

I am, like (I assumed) pretty much the entire population of these islands, a lifelong purchaser of M&S knickers. Or have been. But – and maybe it’s my age – recently I’ve been noticing that (like all too many aspects of modern life) that fings ain’t what they used to be in the quality department. I can remember when a pair of M&S pants lasted until the elastic gave up the ghost (indeed, I may already still have some from the old St Michael’s days), but these days the elastic doesn’t get a chance to go because the fabric of the pants itself has shredded long before that happens. Some of this may be down to lifestyle choice (cycling is hard on the bottoms of my trousers too) but the holes aren’t appearing in the obvious place for bike related wear, and at a time when we’re all being urged to avoid fast fashion, we should surely be able to expect pants to last a little longer than a couple of years before becoming, well, a bit pants.

M&S do offer some slightly more robust options which are twice the price as their basic pants, but while I’m happy to pay a bit more for an ethical or sustainable option I resent paying a premium just to have something that’s not rubbish – and which aren’t stocked in the form that I like in the Bigtown Marks. So, setting aside the shopping habits of a lifetime, I have been exploring other options.

Bigtown High Street was no help at all here. Apart from M&S there are two cheaper clothes retailers stocking knickers, both at the budget end of the market. They appear to have taken a divide-and-conquer approach to the local value-conscious pants shoppers with one apparently focusing on your maturer customer, stocking only enormous knickers, while the other is going for the younger, itchy-looking thong market (I’m aware I’m generalising wildly here).

That left only Bigtown’s splendid independent department store, the sort of traditional emporium that every town used to boast, where the joke would go that you knew God didn’t exist because you couldn’t buy Him there. I’ve shopped at their menswear department before (they do a nice line in Scottish made lambswool jumpers in surprisingly brave colours) and we’ve lunched at their restaurant-that-time-forgot (special of the day yesterday was beef olives which I haven’t seen on a menu since I was at school) but never had the courage to venture into the depths of the lingerie department. They didn’t have the particular pants I wanted either but were willing to order some. So that is what I have done. I could have just ordered them online for the same amount, but having been struck at just how hollowed out the high street has become in recent years, I felt I’d better support the retailers we have while we still have them.

And besides, I now feel like I have passed some sort of a lifetime milestone here. I may dress largely in tatty grey jumpers and magical tweed hats and generally come across as someone who lost a fight with a laundry basket,* but underneath, I will now be someone who shops at Barbours. And – as people in Bigtown know – that is actually quite a thing.

* Hey, this is an actual look, apparently