I took advantage this morning of the current relenting in the weather and a few days of forecast fine weather to wash and reproof our winter jackets and, honestly, this feels like the most grown up thing I’ve done since I bit the bullet and got myself a pension fund.
Our waterproofs have been working pretty hard these past few months, and I expect will do so again before we can properly say winter is over, but today did feel like the end of the beginning. I even got out into the garden to plant my potatoes (Charlotte again, thanks for asking). Normally I like to get them in the ground on St. Patrick’s Day but given the weather we’ve had it would have been more like drowning them than planting them this year, so I gave it a couple of days to let the soil dry off a little.
We also took advantage of the drier weather to get out for a walk this lunchtime, and we were struck by the cones that have lived by the edge of the road so long we’ve stopped noticing them. Long enough to grow moss, indeed
Or a whole plant …
Or even start to merge into the landscape altogether…
I’ve blogged before about the joys of Scotrail’s Club 50 railcard and its occasional flat fare offers where you can go from anywhere in Scotland to anywhere else in Scotland for £19 (up from £17 but still a bargain), including, crucially, journeys via England and, vitally, always in the form of an open return which is the Best Ticket.* This year, they added an extra twist by offering the same flat fare to a companion who doesn’t have a card, as long as they travel with someone who does (and if you hurry, it’s still open till April 1st). As the other half prefers to stay home if at all possible, he’s never bothered with a Club 50 card, but this was an opportunity too good to miss, so we immediately booked ourselves a sunshine break, aka a long weekend in Dundee, where it is always sunny (OK, technically North Fife, where my aunt and uncle live, but you can see the sunshine on Dundee from their house, so effectively the same thing).
We set off on Saturday and enjoyed a trouble-free trip up via Glasgow Central, possibly the last time someone will be typing that particular phrase for quite a while, and had a lovely time enjoying Dundee’s maritime heritage (in various states of repair) and public artworks, as well as catching up with all the family news and going on long bracing walks in the fresh air (I said Dundee was sunny, I never said it was warm).
I did keep monitoring the trains, given the Glasgow Central fire, but we were planning to go back via Edinburgh so I wasn’t unduly worried. However, I’d forgotten that a leg of the journey involved TransPennine Express, which never knowingly misses an opportunity to cancel a train, so we woke on Tuesday morning ready to travel home only to find all the usual Edinburgh to Carlisle services cancelled because reasons. Fortunately Avanti were made of sterner stuff and had diverted their normally Glasgow-bound trains to either Motherwell or Edinburgh so were able to take up the slack. It meant lunch at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh (I believe there are other places to eat in Edinburgh but I always end up at the Fruitmarket) while we waited for a train, and then we were only home an hour later than planned. We even had a reservation on the cancelled train, so I could probably do a Delay Repay claim if I was feeling obnoxious enough, although given the fact the fare was only £19 for the whole trip it’s probably not worth the effort, except to make a point.
Depite this mild disruption, it was a great mini break, and once more has justified my annual Club 50 card fee several times over. Although – and I’ve had occasion to complain about this in the past – not one of the various ticket inspectors we encountered along the way felt the need to actually ask to see my card. OK, so maybe both of us look well into the relevant age bracket … but would it kill them to pretend?
Sunday might have been the start of meteorological spring (at least according to Radio 4, and who am I to argue) but today definitely marked the start of sartorial spring (a whole month earlier than two years ago, I note) – the season when, whatever you were wearing when you left the house, it will be wrong by the time you get to your destination. We woke to frost on the skylight this morning, and although the sun was warm through the window, it was cold enough that setting off into Bigtown in full winter regalia didn’t seem outrageous – coat, hat, buff over my ears, big winter boots, and my lobster gloves, although in fairness the lobster gloves did feel slightly like overkill and I was mainly wearing them because those are the only warm gloves that have survived the winter glove-losing season.
By the time I got into town, though, there were people walking about in shirts and shorts, and not just the approximately one-third of Bigtown’s male population who have (possibly for a bet?) spent this whole winter in shorts, but usually combined with a bobble hat and a puffer jacket (is this happening everywhere? One of the downsides of spending less time on social media is I have no idea if this is just a Bigtown thing, or Gen Z doing whatever they can to baffle old people, or some sort of a meme). It wasn’t exactly warm, but it was a nice enough day to feel a bit self conscious about my big gloves, although as I hadn’t brought any others (and there’s only about three weeks in July when I feel warm enough to ride my bike bare handed) I was stuck with them. Probably serves me right for all the times I’ve looked incredulously at another young person going about bare legged (I even saw one lad in flip flops on an icy day this winter – albeit still with the woolly hat and down jacket).
Anyway, in other signs of spring – look!
One day I’ll take a decent photo of a lamb. That day is not today.
Clambering into my waterproof trousers for the third time this week, as I prepared to set off for today’s planned litterpick, I did slightly wonder why I was doing it – it’s not as if I’ve been sentenced to do Community Payback, this was entirely voluntary. Especially given the weather – the rest of the country might finally be glimpsing spring, but it seems Cornwall has given us our weather back and today’s outlook was firmly set to minging.
But we do try to be a bit civic minded in Bigtownshire Cycle Campaign, and litter picking is very much a civic virtue in Bigtown, so I sucked it up, fully expecting it to be just me and the other two organisers glumly doing some token tidying up in the driving rain. So we were pleasantly surprised that in the end, there were ten of us, the rain let up a little, we picked up 18 bags worth of litter and I managed to make the path a little wider (at least for the 100 metres or so I could manage before my back started to make its opinion felt in no uncertain terms).
So all in all, I was feeling like the day had gone much better than I might have expected, until I got to the farmers’ market an hour later than our usual time to find that the vultures had pretty much cleaned the place out – no almond tart, no sausages, and (the other half’s particular favourite and a Bigtown specialty) no haggis samosas.
It’s been a disappointing week, and it’s not just the weather. On Sunday I heard that there had been protests on Friday night outside the hotel where a number of asylum seekers are being accommodated – whipped up by a cock and bull story about a mobile phone supposedly proving that one of the guys in the hotel was a sex offender (‘proves’ that is if, by ‘sex offender’ you mean ‘a brown person with photos of white girls on their phone’, and by ‘their phone’ you mean ‘a phone found on a beach that wasn’t theirs’ and also, that we’re somehow living in Mississippi in the 1950s). The fact that the whipper-upper is themselves a convicted criminal seems to be neither here nor there, and nor does it matter that the police have dismissed any suggestion of a crime (see also: this not being Mississippi in the 1950s), nor have any of the numerous attempts at debunking made a difference – the cock and bull story has grown arms and legs (er, not sure where this metaphor is going), including something about school children being issued with rape alarms* which, honestly, I’m too tired and demoralised to find out any more about.
Indeed, my attempts to look up what was going on at the hotel online have only served to make the algorithm think I’m interested in this crap, which means suddenly I’m being recommended to follow all sorts of random local people on Facebook who are now trying to make the Friday protest a weekly thing. While my regular feed is full of right-thinking people deploring the violence and debunking the misinformation, I’m seeing depressing glimpses of another side of the local social media scene, which is just as certain that it’s got right on its side, only with less accurate grammar (even their protest poster has got ‘their’ and ‘there’ muddled up, and I know it’s exactly that kind of snotty observation that doesn’t help, but once an editor …). I’d hoped Bigtown had escaped the worst of the nastiness kicking off over refugees elsewhere, but it seems it was just a bit slow getting started. And I feel pretty helpless to know what to do about it. There will be another counter protest, apparently, and obviously I’ll go, but it all just feels a bit pointless, because it will just be the two parts of the town shouting past each other, and maybe this time their (or ‘there’) side might even be bigger.
Reasons to be cheerful needed.
* Although as a battle-hardened cycle campaigner (and gnarly feminist to boot) it does wryly amuse me to note how quickly people can grasp when it suits them that requiring children to carry rape alarms for their own safety is not exactly tackling the problem of predatory men, even while they continue to go into meltdown at the sight of a cyclist not wearing a helmet daring to complain about the dangers from drivers.
… as we like to joke, whenever more than one vehicle passes us on our lunchtime walks. Although given that in today’s case the traffic in question was a timber lorry, a quad bike and a flock of sheep, possibly not exactly like Piccadilly Circus unless London has changed even more than I thought since we moved here.
We weren’t in any real hurry so we were happy to wait behind a couple of gates that were closing off the road, while three farm people and two and a half sheepdogs* moved the sheep into a pen before getting them loaded onto a trailer and on to pastures new. The dogs were doing their herding stuff but as the guy manning the gate admitted, most of the actual sheep moving was down to the attraction of a large bag full of tasty sheep treats which they were eagerly following. This explains the mystery of how much ovine attention we attract when we’re walking the rubbish down in bags on Bin Day. Obviously, Bin Day is exciting for us anyway, but it’s clearly as nothing to the prospect of treats and a trailer ride to a field full of sheep.
Then with the traffic finally cleared, I was free to head off on my bike to visit some former neighbours and (of course) inspect the ford, which has lost half its depth gauge (fortunately, the less useful half, as once the river has topped three feet at that point, any extra depth is pretty irrelevant), and also the stout chain that used to hang across the river, presumably to catch any unwary drivers who had overestimated the wading abilities of their faux-by-faux vehicles. As you can see, for once it’s not us that’s getting all the rain; they say there are villages in Cornwall that are now on their 50th straight day of rain. Perhaps that’s where the rest of the depth gauge has been sent …
Staring idly out the window a couple of days ago (hey, it has cognitive benefits), I was bemused to spot a small coonsil van stopping right outside our gate and executing a three point turn not quite quickly enough to get away before I’d hopped into my wellies and gone out to find out what was going on.
I’d thought he was possibly lost, but it turns out he’s the poor soul in charge of the roads in our neck of the woods, and also the owner of some of the cones that have been appearing dotted around the place near the worst stretches of road (although I forgot to ask about the one still enjoying some wild swimming in my least favourite pothole). Indeed, he is the persone behind the new cones on our actual road (there are a couple that have been there I think since we moved here), and there may even be plans afoot to fix it (there was some careful expectations management going on at this point).
Given our road serves six houses, and is currently being hammered to death by timber lorries, I am pretty realistic about where we stand in the priority list, but it’s good to know the coonsil knows it a) exists and b) is beginning to crumble away at the edges. He seemed most concerned at the lack of a safety rail (there’s a fairly steep drop to the burn further down, although there are plenty of safety trees that would prevent your car from actually plunging into it), but there have been some other cases recently locally of neglected rural roads collapsing altogether, so perhaps a little shoring up wouldn’t go amiss. I’m more concerned about the place where someone has done a spot of amateur road repairs and dug a trench across the road to try and drain the water which turned a previously avoidable pothole into a bicycle heffalump trap. Some things are best left to the professionals, and that includes road repairs, in my opinion.
Anyway, we parted on amicable terms (I think he was grateful I hadn’t come out to completely chew his ear off) and he left having taken note of our mystery grit bin which stopped being filled several years ago and is no longer on the coonsil’s grit bin map, having possibly gone feral. So far nothing has happened on our road, although one of the worst potholes on Nearest B Road has been refilled (the lump of tarmac that was filling it before had come loose and slid out and then someone had a go at putting it back in again, to no great effect – see my remarks earlier about road repairs and professionals).
They’ve also been busy further down the road, finally upgrading a give way to a full blown stop, and I had to stop again and thank the guy that was doing it because that’s one of those tricky junctions where (as I have almost found out to my cost) you don’t have quite as good visibility as you think, and more than one driver has come a cropper there in recent years.
There is a massive amount of grumbling about potholes, here and elsewhere, and I get it, because the roads do seem to be getting worse. But then again we are in the middle of one of the wettest winters we have had for a long time (although at least we’re not the ones suffering biblical levels of rain for once) and there is an awful lot of road to keep on top of in Bigtownshire, serving not that many people. So while I’ll keep an eye out for my new best friend to come back, bringing his road mending buddies with him, I’m not holding my breath, just hoping that one day we’ll be pleasantly surprised. You never know, it might happen.
In the breaks in the weather this weekend, I’ve been trying to get my willow fedge somewhat back under control, or at least trying to stop it turning into what it wants to be, a line of trees. I’ve long since given up on the idea that this will become some kind of formal woven lattice as originally envisaged, and am treating it more as an endless source of willow withies, and an excuse to get out into the garden in February.
As someone well into my maintenance years, I am beginning to realise that this is my life now: endlessly keeping on top of stuff in order to keep the show on the road, and it’d not just about fighting back the garden’s tendency to revert to hedgerow and sileage field. Just keeping me going is becoming a full time job what with the ever more elaborate dental routine, the daily stretches and exercises, the eye steaming, and suddenly needing an actual eight hours sleep like a normal person. Perhaps it is always like this, but it’s only when you get middle aged that you actually start to do it. I suppose at least with gardening it passes for a hobby and is mostly enjoyable, although more so in May than in endless drizzly grey February. All the more reason for trying to spend less time on social media I guess. Although spending less time doomscrolling in order to have more time to floss doesn’t seem like quite the win I might have hoped for in my giddy youth.
And talking of giddy youth, some good news at least for 2026, with my niece cleared of two of the three charges against her and out on bail while they decide about a retrial on the third, which the jury couldn’t decide. It’s been a long road to get here, and it’s not over yet, but at least she is finally home.
* Title borrowed from an episode of a TV series I watched what I would have described as ‘a few years ago’ but which Wikipedia tells me was aired in the last century. The joke being that there is no romance in maintenance but you have to do it anway.
I started to type all this into Facebook, and then wondered why I was giving Mark Zuckerburg my eyeballs, when I have a perfectly good platform of my own. So we take a break from the everyday life of countryside cycling folk to have a wee rant about immigration policy changes. Enjoy!
The Home Office is consulting on its changes to how settled status is ‘earned’ and if you live in this country you should probably fill it in. But be warned, it’s one of those consultations that assumes you agree with the premise, and are just quibbling over the details. I don’t think people should have to jump through a load of extra hoops beyond living here and not being actual criminals before being granted the right to stay but it was quite hard to shoe-horn that in!
Two really important points to me – one, if people are going to have to show that they’ve integrated then that should be through learning about their rights – employment rights, fair trials, free speech, right to protest, how our democracy works. Not because I think anyone really needs to jump through a hoop marked ‘integration’ in order to settle here (other than how to stand in a queue, obviously) but because everyone needs to know these rights so they don’t get exploited. Where immigration (especially illegal immigration) does harm communities is when citizens’ rights are eroded because there’s a large pool of desperate people who have no ability to stand up to exploitation, including crappy housing, zero hours contracts, and being held in debt or visa bondage. This is why all this ‘no recourse to public funds’ rhetoric becomes so dangerous. If we want strong protections for ourselves, we should make damned sure they aren’t being eroded by unscrupulous employees (or landlords or agencies or whoever) exploiting ignorance, desperation and fear. If the Life in the UK test does anything, it should be giving people a really thorough grounding in their rights in this country. And we Brits should probably all do it ourselves too.
Second, this idea that people can cut their qualifying period for getting settled status by volunteering, that can get in the sea. Sure, it sounds appealing at first – but volunteering that you HAVE to do isn’t volunteering, it’s slave labour, and it undermines all the real benefits that come from actual volunteering. Not only that but you just know that the worst people in the world, all the slimy grafters and crooks, will move into this space and start setting up cod volunteering opportunities and charging people to attend them, and it will start to chip away at yet one more of the really precious things we have in society.
Anyway, there’s more, but you can probably guess the rest. I will add this. I predict that in ten years time, as the impact of our ageing society starts to be felt, we’ll be fighting other European countries to attract the most immigrants and you know what? If they’ve any sense they’ll all go to Spain which is actually welcoming them instead of skating closer and closer to thin ice (or ICE) with their coded rhetoric. Plus, you know, the weather.
We’ve not been up in the woods behind the house for a while but we’ve been watching a steady procession of timber lorries* on our road these past months. This weekend we went up to inspect progress, (paying due attention to the hazards in the graphically take-no-prisoners forestry warning signs).
They’ve been busy
I think we’ll be seeing a few more lorries yet along our road.
I don’t envy them the conditions underfoot at the moment; it’s been a wet winter so far. And the devastation is always a salutary reminder that most of our ‘forests’ are a cash crop like any other, and what grows up will come down, including some magnificent silver pines that used to tower over the path here.
Further into the wood, there’s a very different feel with the plantation conifers softened with more of a mix of trees and a few places where nature has been allowed to have her way a little more. We’ve talked to the owners, who also come and stay in the woods with their families, and know they’re interested in more than just board-feet, although their replanting is still largely dictated by what the subsidies will allow. So we’re hopeful that when the current battle of the Somme conditions die down, something a little better will emerge than the serried monoculture that was there before.
It will be interesting to see how that develops.
* Including early one morning when our bedroom window lit up bright as day through the curtains despite it being well before dawn; those lorries have some beams on them, it turns out.
Posted by disgruntled 
Town Mouse 
