So, I Voted

And I did it by bike, of course, although given that it was resolutely pissing down, the other half did offer to run me up to New Nearest Village before he left with the car. I spurned his offer because it is only 3 miles at most to the polling station and how wet, realistically could I get?*

Right well that was deeply unpleasant. 60 mph close passes with added road spray joy. Still, #bikesatpollingstations pic.twitter.com/YieKP2NCkc

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) June 8, 2017

But that wasn’t what made the ride up to the village and back one of the more unpleasant experiences I’ve had on the bike, although it didn’t help. As regular readers will know, I’m mainly all ‘yay bike’ and generally full of the joys of cycling, but the road up to the new nearest village is a B road which means it has a white line down the middle, regardless of the fact that each lane is basically just a car-width wide, so drivers put their foot down and go for it. It’s also twisty and manages to be uphill in both directions, because to get to the village you have to climb up and then descend, and then repeat to get home. Mostly this is manageable because there aren’t many cars to deal with. But today it was quite busy, and that just made it grim.

The problem is partly that people in cars apparently have to drive like nutters when it’s raining even though cars mostly have roofs and don’t generally let the rain in, and there’s water running across the road and standing on the road, and flying up into my face as cars pass. But mainly it’s just that the road is too fast and too narrow for any sort of comfort on the bike. The first few drivers to pass me were too close for comfort, but even having a car pass you with room to spare is quite frightening at 60 mph, especially when some of them start to pull back in before they’ve finished passing you.

The thing is – and this is not necessarily the drivers doing anything wrong – when I hear a car coming up behind me, I can’t tell whether they’re going to squeeze past or cross into the other lane to overtake. I can’t tell if they’re going to wait for a clear bit of road or just overtake on the blind bend or with an oncoming tractor. I can’t even tell if they’ve seen me or if they’re on their phone, or what. When I’ve had one or two close passes already, my adrenaline levels go through the roof as I hear another driver approaching behind me. I’m waiting to see if they’ll appear right at my elbow or pass me with care. All I can do is take enough space on the road that I can make room for myself if I do get a close pass and await my fate. After enough cars have squeezed past me regardless, what started as a simple trip on the bike begins to feel like an endless succession of death threats.

I’m not going to lie to you, on days like today, riding a bike up that road isn’t a pleasant way of getting about. If there was an alternative road, I would take it. If there was a candidate promising to build a cycle path up to Nearest Village I’d have voted for them like a shot, whatever party they stood for. As it is, I just have to grit my teeth, do everything I can to ride safely myself, and hope.

It really, really doesn’t have to be this way. There will always be hills and there will always be rain, but there’s no reason why riding a bike should mean taking my life in my hands. One day we’ll rearrange our roads so that I can ride away from speeding traffic, and drivers don’t have to worry about hitting people on bikes.

Meanwhile, if you’re driving and you see a cyclist up ahead, please do this for me: don’t just whoosh past as if the cyclist wasn’t there. Come off the accelerator while you assess the situation – it’s extremely reassuring as a cyclist to hear that from an approaching car. Cross right into the other lane to pass (if you’re crossing the white line a bit anyway – which you mostly need to if you’re giving the cyclist enough room to be safe – you might as well go the whole hog and change lanes). If it doesn’t feel safe to change lanes then don’t pass until it is. Oh, and when you’ve overtaken, please do make sure you’ve actually passed the cyclist before you start moving onto the bit of road they’re currently cycling on, especially if you’re towing a trailer. It will literally only be a few seconds on your journey time. But it could mean the difference between me or somebody like me getting home safely and not.

* the answer is ‘thoroughly’ – once again the only piece of kit which didn’t fail me and let the rain in was my Harris tweed cap, although it would have been better had I not then dropped it in a muddy puddle along with my gloves …

Step Aside ASBO Buzzard

So, I’ve never really quite understood why the good people of Bigtown were so down on the local gull population. It’s near enough to the sea that you’re going to expect there to be gulls and personally I think they give a town a holiday-ish air. I can understand it if you’ve got one that’s built a nest on your house and is busy defending it against all comers, including you, or if you’ve just lost half your chips to an avian maurauder, but otherwise a bird is a bird, even if it’s a bit shouty. Of all the things that’s wrong with Bigtown, I wouldn’t even have put ‘seagulls’ in the top ten, but it invariably comes up in the list of complaints about the place, usually as part of the holy trinity of local issues (dog poo and potholes being the other two of course) – to the point where an Urban Gull Task Force* has apparently been set up to combat them.

And then I was standing innocently minding my own business on the High Street this morning when I felt what appeared to be half a bucket of something being emptied over my head. And realised that I had been literally dumped on from a great height. It turns out that a herring gull can unleash an extraordinary amount of crap in one go and this one had scored a direct hit on my hat, saddle, shoe, back, jacket hood, arm, and both the outside and inside of my Brompton basket.

Oh, and top tip to those in a similar situation: don’t try and get any sympathy from someone who’s spent a season in the Farne Islands.

* As a side note, ‘task forces’ are clearly one of those things, like ‘tsars’, that have suffered from serious devaluation over the years. The first time the UK deployed a task force, it retook the Falklands. The Transport Minister recently set up an Active Travel Task Force to tackle the growing backlash against cycling infrastructure which, disappointingly, has confined itself to calls for evidence and hasn’t got a single battleship. That’s hardly going to bring East Dunbartonshire Council to heel, now, is it?

Angry Person in Local Newspaper

It’s not often I get spontaneously contacted by the local paper for a sadface photo* but I was rung up on Monday in my role as (outgoing!!!) secretary of Nearest Village Community Council to see if I could go and be angry by the river where someone had flytipped some old computers into the water.

Actually this wasn’t too hard because it’s a particularly lovely spot. The last time I was looking over the bridge parapet it was to admire an otter, so finding that someone had used it to dump a load of electrical goods was pretty gutting. There’s a fair bit of flytipping near by (it’s a quiet road and vans can pull right off the road and out of sight) – but normally they confine themselves to chucking it into the bushes, not the river. I even folded my arms at one point, I was that cross.

Anyway, whether it was the folded arms that did it or what, I don’t know, but it attracted the attention of the local angling association who manage the fishing on that stretch of the river, and today they went on a slightly unorthodox fishing expedition and very efficiently cleared out the river. Unfortunately, there’s no sign that the police are at all interested in catching the perpetrators, or we would have gladly dropped off the hard drives so they could see if any identifying details could be retrieved.

If only all my sadfaces were so immediately effective. I wonder if the anglers might also be interested in building cycle lanes?

*Despite rumours to the contrary, it is not a statutory requirement that I be in the paper every week although my role in the Bigtown cycle campaign means I do seem to have to do more than my fair share of Angry People in Local Newspapers poses.

Badgering On

On Monday, riding into Bigtown for an appointment, I was startled to see a badger crossing the road ahead. It was 1:30 in the afternoon, and badgers are properly nocturnal, and more to the point even if they are out in daylight they don’t generally then curl up on the verge and appear to go to sleep, before only grudgingly moving into a ditch when a curious blogger on a bike approaches.

So clearly this was not a well badger, a suspicion that was confirmed when I returned a few hours later to find it now apparently asleep on the tarmac (this is a quiet road). Despite me standing over it for a good ten minutes, and someone else approaching in a four by four, it didn’t move although it was still breathing. Sick or not, I wasn’t going to attempt to move it (even a sick badger can be quite formidable if it takes exception to your actions, however well intentioned) so finally I went home, got in touch with the SSPCA who promised to send someone round, and hoped for the best.

Sadly, the best wasn’t to be, and there was a rather sad badger corpse beside the road when I cycled past the next morning. I also contacted the Badger Trust because there had been no visible marks on the badger, so I was concerned that it might have been poisoned (badgers don’t carry TB in Scotland, but that doesn’t always make them popular with farmers). Anyway, I’ve just heard that the badger in question was probably hit by a car after all. Apparently they often sustain internal injuries without appearing to hurt. This one just took a while to die. So no crime as far as the badger trust was concerned – just another ordinary death on the roads.

Which is good news of a sort – it would be worrying to learn that someone around here was either illegally poisoning wildlife, or else was so careless with poison that badgers were getting poisoned by mistake. But then again, it’s a sign of how blase we are about roadkill that hitting a badger with your car (and they are pretty solid – I’m told they can make quite a dent) and leaving it die is okay. Sad too that my best ever look at a badger (and they are extraordinary creatures when you see them close up) was one that was dying.

Fortunately that’s not the only wildlife sightings we’ve been getting in recent days though. Our adult hares have now been joined by a leveret which has taken to ambling around the garden in an extraordinarily fluffy and endearing way which makes up for its habit of nibbling on the flowers. Hopefully it will stay where it is and not venture too far onto the roads …

Not Dead Only Sleeping

‘Have you given up blogging then?’ the other half inquired rather plaintively this morning (despite the fact that I’m not, and never will be, as funny as I was in 2005).

The fact is, there’s a sweet spot between not doing anything interesting to blog about, and not having enough time to blog about it, and I’m still overshooting it. I may, technically, have become less busy at the end of last week but that doesn’t seem to have translated into my having any more time. Maybe next week …

Part of the problem is that I’m still extricating myself from the clutches of the community council in the parish I no longer live in as even an appeal from the pulpit has not yet produced a willing volunteer to become secretary in my stead. That also means helping distribute the newsletter, which the Brompton and I duly did this afternoon.

Oh okay, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a hardship on an early spring afternoon.

Chionodoxa luciliae

In other news, my birthday present to myself has arrived a few days early.

Keeping Sunny

So this week it happened: a confluence of Pedal on Parliament planning, clashing work deadlines, impending weekend activities and general life stuff meant I had no time between Monday and today to ride my bike, even just to get somewhere, let alone go on a nice bike ride. I even had to hand over paper-fetching duties to the other half, as he was going into town anyway, as I couldn’t justify the time taken to cycle into Bigtown, which is a ninety minute round trip at the best of times.

Today, with deadlines still looming, I had a meeting in town so at least I had an excuse to get on the bike after four days of enforced inactivity. And of course, as soon as I did and got onto the B road, a driver in a four-by-four did their very best to make me regret it by passing fast and close on a bend because clearly a nanosecond’s delay in their Very Important Journey was worth forcing me onto the potholey edge of the road.

But I wasn’t going to let one extremely poorly-endowed driver, nor the four drivers following on behind who also decided to pass me a little bit closer than I would prefer, ruin my only bike ride in days. Indeed, as I got off the B-road and onto the single track roads, I did note when a white van driver waited behind me until I’d looked over my shoulder, and reached a wider part of the road, before passing with plenty of room. And when I came across him parked up at the site of the exciting road works, I stopped and let him know that it was appreciated. Yes, it’s no more than any driver should do, but sometimes you’ve got to spread the love for the people who do the right thing and he was pleased to be thanked.

After that I concentrated on enjoying the ride and all the little positive interactions I enjoyed: from the older chap who said ‘thanking you’ as I rang my bell before passing him on the bridge to the little toddler full of the joys of spring on the river path, whose grandad just gently ushered her out of the way so I could (slowly) pass, rather than snatching her to his bosom at the sight of the Dread Cyclist.

The daffodils have not emerged in our garden yet but the ones lower down the hill are out, if not particularly well focused (I was too lazy to get off my bike and photograph them properly). It will be interesting to see how long it takes for actual spring, as measured in daffs, to work its way up to us. How long my new found positivity lasts under the onslaught of careless driving is another question.

Good Fences make Good Neighbours

Since the cows went in for the winter, we haven’t had any next door neighbours for a while, but about a week ago, some sheep appeared in the field next to the garden.

They’re pretty flighty, so I haven’t been able to take any decent photos of them, but today as I headed out to get the washing in, I noticed that the bleating was a little louder than usual, and looking again, realised that two of them had decided to pay us a call.

This is in fact two sheep, not some weird two-headed sheep creature as it appears here

It is a universal sheep truth that, while they can get through some amazingly small holes in fences when you don’t want them too, they cannot get through a wide open gate when you do. Our garden has four corners, and in one of them is an open gate onto the lane. Our visitors and I proceeded to spend the next fifteen minutes extensively testing this truth as the sheep ran inot every corner of the garden except the one with the open gate. They were even willing to bolt directly past me (at an impressive speed) in order not to go anywhere near the opening.

Apologies for the blurry photo but it was moving at some speed and the light was poor

Tiring of the game, and a bit worried about panicking possibly pregnant sheep, I left them lurking behind the shed like a pair of naughty schoolchildren, and went and rang the farm.

‘I’m pretty sure she can’t see us here’

Two farming chaps came pretty promptly and in the fading light gave a masterclass in garden de-sheeping (farming chap one hides behind the shed, just by the fence. Farming chap two starts chasing the sheep towards the shed. Sheep gets up to warp speed. Farming chap one catches it and effectively bounces it over the fence. Repeat with second sheep).

The problem, apparently, is that our predecessors cut a hole in the fence so their dog could get in and out, and although the farmer keeps closing up the gap, it keeps opening up again. I left them allegedly sheep-proofing the fence again with string (it was too dark by then to see anything), pleased that we discovered this gap in the defences before we had planted the veg plot and not after. I’m already working on a design for a hare-proof fence around the new plot; I might have to upgrade that to a sheep proof one now…