31st May 2015 Sunday run.

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Sunday 31st 50-53F, 10-12C, very windy with bright sunshine. I was up early and hoping for a better day for a longer ride but it is already blowing a gale. 30mph gusts from the SW are promised again with rain after 3pm this afternoon. Which usually means I could cover a lot of ground going somewhere else but take hours to come home again.

Just a 3/4 hour walk to test the cool, overcast and windy conditions. Watched a Nightingale[?] singing in a roadside tree. Superb song with considerable variation. I shall have to wrap up well for my ride as it isn't likely to get much warmer today. The early sunshine has gone with no promise of more to come.

There was some brightness at times as I explored the gorgeous countryside above Fåborg. The whole ride was very hilly in short burst of major corrugations. Fields, woods and forests decorate the bumpy landscape with small villages, hamlets and often pretty houses at intervals.

I seemed to have chosen a day for serious cycling. Being overtaken several times by pelotons of riders with numbers attached. Then there were the clubmen out training as individuals and large groups. It can be quite nerve racking to have thirty riders pass my trike at speed. Their steering is much more agile than mine and a trike has very different needs to remain absolutely stable on rapidly changing cambers. All I can do is maintain a straight line and let them go around me. Their well-honed skills at riding in a mobile and active bunch probably saved the day more than anything I did.

I tried to tack on the back of one untidy gaggle at 10 miles but soon had no wind left on a long uphill drag. It can take me 20 miles to clear the pipes properly these days.

Later I led a large group up a steep hill as nobody seemed keen to pass before we crested the top. Several riders called out well ridden as they passed. I was too breathless to hold a stimulating conversation so just grunted my thanks.

The wind was more helpful on the way back and I cut the 3 hour outward time by an hour. Returning by a different route, again with lots of hills. 5 hours for 62 miles on one sandwich and a banana isn't bad considering all those hills. Though I did drink a couple of mini-boxes of pure apple juice to keep my strength up.

It seems John Kerry is raising international concerns about the safety of cycling. He has crashed twice now. The last time was in 1992. Twice in 23 years seems rather careless to me. At 71 he ought to be seriously considering a tricycle! It seems a pavement stepped out in front of him this time. His bicycle had to be lifted from the Swiss Alps by mountain rescue helicopter. There is no information on the condition of the kerb.
 
John Kerry breaks leg in bicycle crash in France - BBC News

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28th May 2015 Silent Spring?

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Thursday 28th 51F, 11C, windy, heavy overcast, showers. Showers possible for most of the day. Brightening later pm but with 35mph gusts. Mid afternoon and I was being buffeted by vicious crosswind gusts on the main road. Ripped off by yet another supermarket change of name. Exactly the same shop owners, the same items, the same special offers but coming a week later than last week's pre-change of shop name! So I paid full price at the checkout. Crooks, damned crooks and supermarket musical chairs!

They ought to be joining their mutual parasites in the politic-ooze. All the election posters are up. Promising more money in your pockets, more jobs, lower taxes, greater freedom, etc,etc. Same damned lies whichever country is holding an election to the local gravy train. Same damned lies as last time and the next. Same damned lies regardless of party. Still the highest taxes in the world and the highest prices in Europe.

Came back along the lanes to avoid the exposed main road and speeding commuter nutters. Thought I'd managed an excellent, hilly detour for at least couple of extra miles but was ripped off again! One extra mile for only 15 miles total. I don't know why I bother. Brain the size of a minor planet... and she sends me shopping!  (;ø))

Friday 29th 55F, 13C, bright but very breezy. Rain forecast for next 24 hours! My usual walk took exactly an hour thanks to a brisk pace and no dawdling for photography. Half an hour of bright sunshine before the sky lid slid over. Followed by a quarter of windy overcast. Then a quarter of an hour of light rain. Which seems like quite good value, I suppose. Several hares scampered about in the low crops as a buzzard soared effortlessly overhead. Hares seem to like following tracks even a line of soil left by a tractor implement. One smaller hare trotted right up to me, stopped dead and stared, then carried on right past me only a few feet away. It wasn't until I turned round to see where it had gone that it finally took off at a diagonal.

Quite windy but not as fierce as yesterday. Managed the wind direction quite well as I wallowed in gorgeous, spring countryside in a balloon-shaped ride. Birds of prey hunted over the fields and woods as smaller birds encouraged me from the hedgerows. The last leg had more wind resistance as I pressed on to avoid the blackening sky up ahead. It just started raining in the last couple of miles but not enough to dampen my spirits. And, only just enough to produce that wonderful smell of fresh rain on dry roads. I arrived home, put the trike away and there was really nasty, squally downpour! Perfect timing! The 30kph school sign was lit up with bright white LEDS again. It might as well have had a bin bag over its head for all the difference it made to passing traffic. 21 miles.

Saturday 30th 50F, 10C, windy, overcast, showers. It is supposed to brighten up later but gusting to 30mph again. I seem to have recovered from the weird dizziness, weakness, constant headaches, bunged up chest and feeling of being generally unwell. Whether it was being sprayed half a dozen times within a week, or some kind of virus, I will probably never know.

I still haven't developed a useful strategy for when I find myself on a road with a farm  machine spraying right up to the verge. Should I turn and ride as fast possible in the opposite direction? What if that takes me downwind and increases the contamination? Should I hold my breath as I ride past? What about when I am already breathless from climbing a steep hill going right past a sprayer? As happened quite recently.

Is the massive load of pig's excrement and urine dumped repeatedly into my environment a further stressor to my health? It must be saturated with airborne bacteria and viruses even if the heavy concentration of ammonia doesn't directly impact on my system. If a local factory was releasing viruses, toxins and an awful smell there would be a public outcry. When farmers repeat the same offence on the general public, time after time, there is complete silence. The only recourse is to flee to the city. Just as many Danes have done already and increasingly do so despite the very much higher property prices there.

Denmark's very own Silent Spring. Except that it wasn't the birds which were silenced but the Dane's very own offspring. The excited cries from the rural, village school playgrounds have become but a distant, race memory. Perhaps closing them was a subconscious desire by the authorities to protect their own children from the toxic countryside? As is already well documented; few farmers can be trusted to follow the [always voluntary] rules. So the only way to keep future generations of Dane's safe was to banish them from the countryside. Leaving villages to die as only the elderly inhabitants clung on. Increasingly unable to thrive or even survive without the most basic facilities they move into unaffordable old people's homes. To be steadily robbed of their possessions, their health and their humanity. Or to take up a short, residence in some bleak, impersonal city hospital.

With no new blood to replace them the sense of powerless impoverishment and rural isolation is further compounded. With the economic pressures on the remaining small farmers to invest ever more deeply into debt they must give up and sell their land off to ever-larger units. Which strip off the remaining trees and hedges in the name of big-machine efficiency of scale. Leaving thousands of rural homes unsaleable and unsold amongst the uniform, monoculture prairies. Spotted at frequent intervals with automated, industrialised pig factories run by sorely underpaid, foreign workers.

Many rural villages fall steadily into quiet disrepair amidst the silent, unspoken menace and constant threat of forced auction. There is no work in the countryside. The once proud, sprawling lawns of large farmhouses sport nettles, brambles and thickets of self-seeded trees. While the carefully manicured vegetable rows of a few short decades ago have given way to a shelf full of toxic residue. Brought from the other side of the world to the ever more distant, city supermarket, monopoly chain.

A strong and variable crosswind going there under massive, scudding banks of clouds. I stayed dry until almost home again as I dashed for the shelter of the last supermarket. Dark, compressed folds of leaden sky threatened at intervals but I arrived safely home heavily loaded but unscathed. I waved enthusiastically to one driver who was overtaking a string of speeding cars in a 40kph/35mph limit at [probably] 70mph. Well, he had to be Danish royalty, didn't he? Only 15 miles.

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25th May 2015 Have you got this in green?

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Monday 25th, 48F, 9C, breezy, very heavy overcast, raining, with light showers forecast. A snotty nose day. Probably due to all the sawdust I have been making. Perhaps all the nose blowing will help to clear my ears? The sneezing and runny nose abated later. Rode a circle under a heavy overcast but dry. 18 miles.

In between I was sorting through years of accumulated packaging and papers. Managed to lose quite a bit of volume from dumping loads of old bubble packs. Finding old drawings from my youth, when I had searched constantly for winning ideas, was always going to be depressing. I even found an old drawing for my long wheelbase recumbent. Built at a time when recumbents were still cutting edge in America. Probably 30 years too early for the more techno-conservative UK.

My design was spoilt by a weak, sheet aluminium seat. Shortening the top tube/beam to compensate made the head angle too steep and it went into violent shimmies above a certain, quite modest, speed. A heavy recumbent is completely impractical in a hilly city like Bath. Climbing back home out of town up The Hollow was what destroyed the seat! Though the LWB was amazingly fast on the flat I had no willpower left to completely rebuild it. I should have made it adjustable for leg length, used much lower gears and had a stronger, preferably mesh seat. Ah, the wisdom of perfect hindsight.

Tuesday 26th 51F, 11C, heavy overcast, breezy. Odd showers possible. Gusting to 25mph is slightly more windy than yesterday. The cool May continues. It broke a continuous, 22 month record of warmer than average months. It hardly registers compared with the dreadful weather others are having at the moment. The verges are luxuriant with wild plant growth. The Lilac hedges are in flower as are the Hawthorns. I saw a ginger hare which seems to like sitting invisibly on the bare earth beside a field pond each morning. The Mallards, sharing his damp space, were far more nervous of my toddling past at over 100 yards away. Willow warblers were singing everywhere. One warbler I saw singing away in a small roadside tree was rather large, had a yellow-green breast and a raised crest. The wrong song for a Willow or Wood warbler so I'll have to do some more research on that one.

Just waiting for coffee and toast before pedalling off to catch up with the post-bank-holiday shopping. Crosswind going. Headwind coming back but it stayed dry and mostly grey. I see everybody is back to 68-69kp in the 50kph limits. Loads on mobile phones or resting their chin on their hand. Every vehicle cutting the double white lines on every single corner. Cutting to the verge on the inside of every corner so that their braking reaction times are maximised. A large fraction of drivers badly overshooting sharper corners. I didn't get where I am today by cutting corners, nor overshooting!

If you want to see who knows how to drive watch the oncoming vehicles. Not the ones who are overtaking you. If they don't give the overtaking vehicle extra room then they aren't reading the road so aren't real drivers. Just pretending to be. 15 grey miles, dodging incompetent mobile phone operators, with absolutely no sense of road positioning. Nor, were they ever taught defensive driving.

A pair of deer walking slowly away down the forest track. The photo I took at maximum zoom  x12 [300mm equiv on the TZ7] was a bit too soft.

Wednesday 27th 52-60F, 11-15C, bright overcast and rather windy.  Brightening later but with a risk of showers. It went from very dark to bright sunshine repeatedly as I enjoyed a two hour walk through the woods. I really am incredibly lucky to have such beautiful forests, fields and tracks all to myself. A pair of Red backed shrikes were perched on some felled tree branches from earlier hedge cutting. The first shrikes I can ever remember seeing. Except that this male shrike had a glossy, jet black cap as well as an eye stripe! The female was beautifully speckled/mottled on the breast but nothing like a thrush. Another bird mystery to solve. The gusts of wind, on the way back, were so strong I was able to lean on them.

A mid-after noon ride to the shops had me overtaking a gaggle of teenage school-kids out on a cycle jaunt in the forest. Only one lad tried to stay with me on the rather rough and undulating road but soon fell away again. Can you imagine a UK or US school sending a whole class of kids out on their bikes?  How many would actually own bikes in the first place?

Arrived at one supermarket to find a pair of mountain bikes chained across the rack and taking up 6 whole spaces! At the second I had to park the trike outside the extensive, plant and cheapo gardening junk, security cages because the cycle rack access was blocked. Same again at the third where they had piles of pallets full of potted plants blocking access. I wonder whether it is even legal in "cycling friendly" Denmark to block access to a supermarket's entrance? Do they block access to the supermarket cycle racks and supermarket entrances in Odense: "Cykling City 2015?" How would they evacuate in the event of a fire or a bomb threat? Probably better not to ask as the Danish general election is announced for another game of musical chairs on the gravy train.

An old, roadside cottage from 1777 which has been standing empty for years after a "refurbishment" with new [heavy modern style] windows and a newly thatched roof. Not only is it badly arranged internally but the sunken gable end forms a blind bend only 3' from the wheels of heavy goods traffic!  Sleeping in the upstairs bedroom with only a 4' ceiling height and listening to the passing traffic must be fun! It was described as the home of a saddle maker as late as 1960. Most of the houses around it were also small businesses back then. The historical [commercial] aerial photographs, now freely available online, show that the majority of rural homes were thatched. 

The early-bird psychos were in commuting mode on the way home. Nose-to tail in case they missed their place on the road. Brushing past only a foot from my elbow. Now the strong gusts were causing a rather nasty headwind. Only 10 miles today.

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