23rd April 2015 Mud, glorious mud!

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Friday 23rd 46-57F, 8-14C, overcast, breezy. It is supposed to brighten up later. I have just spotted a tiny blue opening in the clouds! I'd better go and disturb the birds in the woods. You'd think they'd know I wasn't dangerous by now.

There were several gorgeous bunches of Oxslips in the woods.

Sometimes you just have to smile. A Goldfinch was singing in/on a tree beside the road. The traffic was so heavy that he was completely inaudible. So he was twisting from side to side on his twig like some frustrated, animated cartoon character. I saw my first Swallows of this year. Though the cloud is still very heavy there were some pleasant warm periods of bright sunshine. Almost everything seemed to have suddenly turned green within the last couple of days. Still lots of mature trees waiting to come into leaf. Oaks are probably the last roundtoits.

I rode a different way today by a route which I rarely take. Nicely hilly with almost no traffic at all and lots of sunshine. Had an interesting chat with the owner of a Batavus electric bicycle outside a supermarket. Quite a sophisticated machine with pedal force sensors inside a large casting around the bottom bracket/chainwheel. An enclosed Bosch motor provides the automatic tailwind. Batavus made 2-stroke mopeds at one time. The parallels with these battery driven machines is fairly obvious.

The pig's muck spreading continues unabated. Most of the roads are covered in baked on mud. Which is causing annual problems with the traffic caused, clouds of brown dust getting into my lungs. I'm coughing and clearing my throat a lot! Though I may just be allergic to the ammonia content of the slurry. Not to mention being bumped about by the hard mud mushrooms and gravel bigger than both my thumbs put together. You could say I'm all thumbs on farmer's mud. But you'd be wrong.

The Danish parliament has just agreed a few more billions on top of already-inflated EU subsidies to further subsidise the farmers for their <cough> environmental work <cough!> Lies, damned lies and the endlessly corrupting, unelected EU politic-ooze. They should get off their lazy arses and visit a few of these <cough> environmentally friendly farms <cough!>  They could always get the EU army to lend them a tank or tracked, armoured personnel carrier to reach the farms by road. Though being so important they will probably want to use a helicopter or executive jet on "environmental grounds" at EU taxpayer's expense with a [konservative] 50% lost to corruption and waste. 18 miles. [Not out!]

Click on any image for an enlargement.

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