27th April 2017 Whoops! Eeek! Aargh! 😨

Thursday 27th 32-44F, 0-7C, bright sunshine, almost calm with a hard white frost on the grass.Walked to the village. No ride today as I was doing hours more, of backbreaking exercises at home.

Friday 28th 40-46F, 4-8C, wet start. Walked to the village. Another mixed day of torture with a shovel and wheelbarrow.

Saturday 29th 40-50F, 4-10C, grey and almost still. Showers possible. Aching all over. My walk along the lanes helped to relieve the pain of overdoing it for the last week. A Shelduck flew over. Several luxury 2-seater cars went past at high speed. Race across Denmark?

Today I fell off my trike for the first time since I first started tricycling seriously again over seven years and 50 thousand miles ago. I was looking left across the road with a car approaching along a narrow lane. When I failed to spot a 4" [10cm] vertical drop off the side of the asphalt. I was doing just under 10mph [16kph] when the inside wheel dropped into empty space.

I tried to recover by hanging over the other wheel to try to roll back onto the road further on. But ended up in the long grass of the verge. Eventually the adverse slope became too much and I fell over sideways to my right into the field. My elbow was a bit sore at first and I have some pain in my right calf. The car driver stopped to check my chances of survival and I waved back that I was fine. Then it was onward to the shops feeling very foolish. At least the large bunch of earlier cyclists did not see my acrobatic misdemeanor. My reputation as a tricycling clown remains intact.

A large number of motorcycles went past in a long string through the village. At least 40 I should think and all of very mixed makes and ages of machine and rider. They were followed by a few more at intervals. Then it was back home for only 8 miles. I am still aching from all the exertion over the last week. Though nothing really noticeable from the fall except my painful calf. Probably just a tensing strain.

I have just discovered that it takes 8 button presses to go from Trip Distance to cadence on the Sigma 16-16. One press for the 16.12. Given the sheer number of bottomless drops off the side of the road, some up to 30cm or 12" deep, I may not reach Cadence very often. At least, not unscathed!  😬

Sunday 30th 35-50F-2-10C, bright and sunny with a light frost on the grass. Warming quickly but with 15m/s winds from the south east promised for later. Walked to the village and back. The calf pain from yesterday's grass diving has gone. The coots were having a bit of a squabble on the church pond. I now how they feel. The wind was picking up on the way back. So that it was cool, but not cold, on the hands. Three Mallards were hanging about suspiciously on a field track. Between bouts of traffic the air was full of birdsong. There was also the sound of geese, ducks and everything else with a voice. The trees could be truly and finally be said to be bursting out all over.

Emperor Trumpet [Twit@US] has forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove all reference to Climate Change from their website as "false advertising."  6.5 billion will soon wish they had dropped Trumpet@MOAB.Twit [Mother of All Bullshitters] on Afghanistan!

There I was blaming my strange aches and pains on freestyle washboarding the stairs and it was 5 weeks ago! It felt more like a fortnight ago. Why do I still have chest pains when I breathe in too hard? Pant. Or sneeze? That really hurts! Pressing my right pectoral stops the pain completely and [almost] prevents it happening when I sneeze. Broken rib? Torn muscle? Surely they would hurt all the time? I may never walk the same again

Late morning ride to the more distant shops against a strong cross, then headwind. More of a crosswind coming home heavily laden. 15 miles.

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24th April 2017 Navy blue skies!

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Monday 24th 43F, 6C, a wet day with gales. It was so dark at 6.45am this morning that I needed a torch to check the wall clock. It stayed dry for my walk up to the woods but was blowing a gale again.

I passed by the pond on the marsh and saw a diving bird a little smaller than the Mallards. Far more slender too, with a white face and dark head. I immediately thought Grebe but it wasn't the usual Great Crested. The nearest to it [on a Google search] was the Western or even the Horned Grebe but I'm not sure either of these are normal to Scandinavia. I'd need a spotting telescope to see it properly at that distance.

Another day of exhaustion, in another life, in the garden. No ride again!

Tuesday 25th 35-46F, 2-8C, chilly but with hardly a breeze. Frost on the lawns. Showers possible. No walk or ride as the marathon gravel movement continues.  Cold and windy day until late afternoon with bright sunshine.

Wednesday 26th 35F, 2C, sunny but not cloud free. Hard, white, overnight frost on the grass. Lighter winds with rain forecast for this afternoon. According to the DMI April is cooler than March for the first time in 44 years. No walk today because I was still ferrying gravel for most of the day.

First ride for several days. The sky was pitch black to the north as I left. With bright sunshine in my vicinity there was an incredibly strong sense of 3D between the foreground trees and background woods. For once I actually stopped to take a picture, or five. My TZ7 camera was completely blinded by the bright foreground soil against the black skies. This was the best of those I took. Unfortunately I have to reduce image size dramatically for the blog. So much of the scale and drama is lost in this image.

One supermarket had no stock of everyday items. The next tried to rip me off on prices not matching the shelf labels. Which is handy for crooks, because most people reject taking a receipt when asked. That's right. You don't automatically get a receipt unless you respond in the affirmative when asked by the checkout operator. Is that a license to print money, or what? Only 8 miles.

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21st April 2017 Head Gardener's apprentice.

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Friday 21st 46F, 8C, dark grey, light winds with a threat of rain now and then with wind later. Still busy in the garden so no walk today. No ride either as I was set to work moving sand and gravel in dozens of wheelbarrow trips. Despite my best efforts the iceberg did not tip in my favour. The servant's entrance is still blocked to tricycles so I have much more work to do.

Saturday 22nd 40F, 4C, bright and breezy with possible showers. A good day for barrowing? Did you know that tricycles are also known as "barrows." Probably in recognition of their vast carrying capacity compared with those silly machines which fall over when not actually fitted into a bicycle rack. Even bicycle racks have at least two meanings. Both a carrying device and a parking place.

The problem with most bicycles is that the big rear wheel gets in the way of real bags. Panniers can help to overcome this problem but these bags are, by necessity, narrow and tall and sit right out in the breeze. Which increases both the frontal area but also adds huge drag due to the rectangular cross section. 

A saddlebag is sheltered by the rider's bulk and has enough depth for carrying more reasonable  quantities of "real stuff." Unfortunately, the vast majority of saddlebags are aimed squarely at bicycles and don't fit those very well anyway. Additional support systems are vital if the bag is not to become a very large and efficient, though non-adjustable, drag brake. Many a steel mudguard has served double shifts in supporting a badly sagging bag. The trend to naked tyres does not favour the longevity of any bag dangling unaided from the saddle. 

Meanwhile the rear triangle of a tricycle has acres of spare room. It can have a bag deep enough to carry serious quantities of "stuff." Provided the bag fits easily between the rear wheels it need only avoid the circular saw action of the rear sprockets from below. The height to the underside of the saddle is the next important parameter which must be addressed. Those sporting several feet of visible saddle pin are laughing. The vertically challenged have no such luck.

The Trykit could easily manage a 50x30x30cm saddlebag if one were available. That's 45 liters of recycled sports bag in New Money! By comparison, the largest Carradice 'Camper' saddlebag [see image left] is a bijou purse for girls to dance around at the disco. Strictly a lipstick, mascara and packet of tissues carrying capacity even with a following wind. Hardly room, even, for one of those obsolete iPhoneys which used to be so popular with real blonds. 

A tricycle rack is a serious bit of kit and ought to be considered vital to heavy transport duties. The rack keeps the saddle bag safely off the cassette. While providing plenty of even support for a brace of milk churns or a three seater settee. Or any other regular transport needs of the serious tricyclist. The tricycle rack helps to spread the loads into the rear triangle of stays and so avoids unnecessary mechanical stresses. It also stops the bag from flopping into the wheels when you take those vicious, supermarket, car park ramps at 37 mph and 45°. As you desperately try to cross the traffic as an oncoming sociopath puts his foot down to cut you off.

Did you know I broke my first trike by carrying a hundredweight [112lbs] of sand and gravel the fifteen miles home from Bristol to Bath? That was back in the last century but being an immature youth is no real excuse. I borrowed an empty drum from work to carry the load and the mechanical torture broke one of the chainstays. You would not believe the hills I had to climb out of Bristol with that load!

The reason for this total insanity was that none of the sand stockists in Bath were open while I was at home. I could not bring myself to steal some sand from the local golf course bunkers. Not even if I had been willing to pick out the dog's muck. My excuse for needing the sand was to build a sand-filled loudspeaker baffle. Well, you have to, at least once. Don't you?

Today I walked my usual route up to the woods and back down by the other track. It was blowing a gale! Making it quite difficult to keep my baseball cap on a lot of the time. Few such caps are supplied as standard with chin straps.

Three distant hares pretended to be invisible to my binoculars out on the bare field. Then I spotted a bird of prey. It was blowing too hard to keep my binoculars still enough. So I crossed the road and borrowed a signpost to steady the view. Which upset the bird of prey so that it took off and soared much closer. Light underneath, wings tapering almost to a point, with 'fingers' at the tips  and a very long tail. Possibly a Goshawk, but it's a wild guess. The undersides of the wings were differently marked to the images posted online. More like the usual darker "contour lines" common to some other birds of prey rather than uniformly speckled.

There was a short sprinkle of rain as I neared home on the main road. Judging from all the traffic there must be a sale somewhere. Or they are escaping some dire circumstance yet to register on our rural-detached radar. I was excused tricycle shopping on account of a double marathon wheelbarrow race to move a load of gravel. It would not have been much fun riding in the gale force winds.

Sunday 23rd 40-48F, 4-9C, bright and windy but not cloud free. Walked anticlockwise up to the woods and back the other way. I hadn't gone far before a Nuthatch started scolding me loudly from the roadside trees. A few gulls dotted the huge expanses of bare earth. Still no sign of the first, familiar, green blush at grazing viewpoints. Elsewhere, glistening waves raced across the foot tall, grass-like crops as the wind roared in my ears.

Half a dozen deer were sheltering in the conifers but moved away through the shadows. Once out of the woods there were mixed flocks of small birds foraging in the bare fields. There were Chaffinches, Sparrows, Yellowhammers and the very populace Great tits. Up to fifty Fieldfares are still sharing the big lawns with the clockwork Starlings. Despite the wind I still have to go shopping. I have been slacking on the shopping front while wheel-barrowing gravel for hours on end. But no, another day of shoveling and wheel-barrowing gave me enough exercise for another day. When will it ever end?

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