vast insurmountable cheese mountain

More warm spring weather, and no big hurry to get to work, so I went for a longish route to work instead of the usual 22 mile route. It was a great ride, and lovely to be in the middle of spring filled lanes, with all of that freshly unwrapped green, and thick green warn misty morning light.

Covered 28 miles in 01h:40, at about 16.5 mph.

On the way home, I had no rush to be back, so I went for a much longer route home, of about 43 miles. I called in to see an old university friend in Clutton. He was still at work, but it was nice to meet his wife and kids. Then I got hopelessly lost in the tiny lanes around Harthill and Burwardsley. The Peckforton Hills is a really beautiful area of Cheshire, and are located in the middle of the Cheshire Plain. I have been cycling around some of them before, as part of the Cheshire Cycleway Route. I have ridden the 135 mile version of the route a couple of times, but last year rode the full 175 miles of it, plus an extra 27 miles to get to 202 miles in about 16 hours of being out of the house, or about 14 hours of cycling.

Anyway, it’s a lovely area, and there are some really beautiful roads for cycling. If you’re familiar with Beeston Castle then you might enjoy cycling around the Peckforton Hills, because it offers some usual views of Beeston that you don’t normally see. There are lots of tiny roads, and hills rearing out of nowhere, covered in mature pine and broadleaf trees.

After I’d got lost, I worked out where to go again and headed off through Peckforton / Bunbury / Alpraham / Church Minshull / Middlewich. It was great to be out on the bike, and to get out on some different roads instead of the usual commute-to-work roads.

Total: 42.92 miles, in 02h:52 mins, at 14.9 mph.

And now spring has arrived, vividly green and fecund. We went on holiday last week, to North Wales, and when we came back, the change in the plants and weather was stunning. It felt like all of the trees and hedgerows had burst forth their leaves, which were all an unreal vivid green colour. May is such a wonderful month in the UK, because the warm weather really kicks in, and the plants and flowers look so new and fresh.

Later in the year, lack of rain and hot sun tend to make the foliage on plants look jaded and worn out, or creased and browned and crinkled and old and frazzled. Not so in May. If I had to order the months of the year in order of preference, May would come top of the list every time.

When we were driving home from the holiday, we went down a road I go down on the way to / from work, and the difference in the trees was incredible. The horse chestnut leaves had all come out, and the vivid green of the hawthorn hedges was beautiful. Not to mention the blossoms on trees, and all of the wonderful flowers. The Llyn Peninsula in Wales was jam packed with yellow flowering gorse, which smells strangely enough of coconut.

Yesterday I caught the train to work. The morning was warm and misty, in the way mornings often are, before the heat of the sun burns the mist off and leaves everything sharp and hot and crisp. I saw a field full of oilseed rape, and the flowers looked pale yellow. When I came home again in the evening, the change in the colour of the yellow was amazing. Have a look on google images to get an idea of how lovely the yellow is.

Another great Monbiot article called The Great Consolidation. Here is an excerpt:

Everything is getting bigger and further away. Hospitals, post offices, schools and prisons are being “rationalised” and “consolidated”. The government says that this process improves efficiency. Instead, it outsources inefficiency: we must travel further to use public services. This is bad for the environment, bad for community life, bad for universal provision. But we haven’t seen anything yet. We are about to be confronted with the biggest shutdown of all: the government has started the process of closing England’s network of doctors’ surgeries.

Seems this one wasn’t introduced with a fanfare by the government:

If you know nothing of this, don’t blame yourself. The announcement was buried in an interim report published last October by a health minister(1). The report was 52 pages long, and the policy was explained in a single paragraph on pages 25 and 26. Rather than being brought before parliament, it was released four days before MPs returned from their recess. Since then there has been no further public announcement.

It’s a sad thing to hear of. Doctors surgeries are so vital to so many people, that the thought of people having to travel a lot further to reach huge “polyclinics” doesn’t make a lot of sense:

The government’s policy is to consolidate doctors’ surgeries into a series of giant health centres or polyclinics. Thousands of small practices will be closed and patients will be processed in buildings containing up to 50 GPs. The new clinics will also house some services currently provided by hospitals, which allows the government to claim that it is bringing healthcare “closer to home”. The net effect will be a massive reduction in convenience.

Looking on Google, it seems they haven’t had a great press so far either. Yet, when did that ever stop the Government from making strange and illogical decisions?

Recently I watched a film called The Flying Scotsman. It’s about a Scottish cyclist called Graeme Obree. Shortly afterwards, I read his autobiography, which is also called The Flying Scotsman.

The film and the book, and the man himself are all really wonderful, and incredible and moving and take you on a real rollercoaster of a ride. Even if you’re not a huge cycling fan, I’m sure you’ll get something out of the film / book.

Obree hails from Scotland, and had a hard childhood. He got into cycling as a teenager, and found he was good at it. He eventually went on to break the world hour record, and went on to achieve successes in Time Trials and Track races at local, national and international levels.

Not only was he a great cyclist, he was a gifted engineer, and took the world hour record on a bike he designed and built himself, riding with a new and innovative style.

Obree also suffers from depression, and has tried to kill himself three times. But thank God, he is still with us, and he is an inspiration to many.

Like the man himself, his own website is a slice of no-nonsense brevity.

I’m beggining to sound like a broken record, or like one of the regulars who writes into the local paper to grumble about the same old thing week after week. Yes indeed, gather round ladies and gentlemen for the litter rant.

Today, as I was cycling into Middlewich down Chester Road, coming from Winsford (around about here) a carton of half eaten chips were chucked from a transit van as it approached the mini roundabout. Damn them all to hell I say, for being such filthy scum! I felt like catching up with the van and banging on the side, but I have a feeling that if I’d done that, the lovely lady who just spewed her filth onto the street, who was just lighting up with the passenger in the middle seat of the van, and the driver, might have taken my environmental protestations the wrong way, and got all physical with me.

So I left it, and felt all annoyed and angry, and now, gee whizz, I’m being really radical, and middle class, and I’m whining about it on my blog. Go Jim, what an activist I’ve become…

Hopefully the birds ate the chips, assuming they didn’t get all mushy ‘twixt car rubbery tyres and black ashpaltyness.

Hopefully the littering lady will drown in her bed in a sea of oven chips, overcome with a sickening sense of regret at the magnitude of her ecological crimes.

For some years now I have been reading (via Medialens (sign up here for free)) Medialens’ Media Alerts. They are  well researched, well argued analyses of the “liberal” press in the uk (as in the BBC, Guardian, Observer, Independent etc). They normally tackle the way an issue is presented in the media, and argue that the liberal press isn’t actually all that balanced, and that it generally pipes the government line on many issues, without challenging them enough.

They’re very illuminating indeed. If you get the time to read them (or probably, more importantly, the inclination), you might be surprised by what you read.

The latest is: COVERING ISRAEL-PALESTINE - THE BBC’S DOUBLE STANDARDS. I won’t recycle the whole thing all over again. Read it and see what you think.

Medialens’ “Cogitations” are pretty interesting too.

Another Pilger article called Latin America: the hidden war on democracy

How terrible that Hugo Chavez (the President of Venezuela) should take it upon himself to challenge the west’s dominance in South America… Given that he is doing, this article dicusses the fact that he is a marked man, and that the secret behind-the-scenes machinations of government interference from external countries are trying as hard as they can to get rid of him.

I mean, for goodness sake, whoever heard of the leader of a country being so darned bold as to try to improve things for the people of his country, rather than bow down to the western model of running things - as stated by Pilger:

One of Chávez’s first acts was to revitalise the oil producers’ organisation Opec and force the oil price to record levels. At the same time he reduced the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and central America, and used Venezuela’s new wealth to pay off debt, notably Argentina’s, and, in effect, expelled the International Monetary Fund from a continent over which it once ruled. He has cut poverty by half – while GDP has risen dramatically. Above all, he gave poor people the confidence to believe that their lives would improve.

Today I read a really brilliant article by George Monbiot, called “The Pleasures Of The Flesh“. Basically, it’s talking about the current global food crisis, and how things could be eased if people were to eat less meat. He isn’t advocating that everyone should become a vegan, since he says, “… after almost every talk I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey…“, which I thought was rather amusing!

Anyway, read it if you have time. I really like Monbiot - and the title at the top of his website speaks volumes:

Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it.
Tell them something new and they will hate you for it.

Today was like a completely different season to last weeks grind against the easterly headwind. I rode out in the rain, but it was warm rain. By Winsford, the rain had stopped, and the countryside was cloaked in a lovely warm rainy mist. By Kelsall Hill Farm a skylark was up above skylarking, and a few lone Scots Pines stood out in a green wet field, surrounded by mist and grass and spring freshness. On the way in I managed 16.4 mph average.

On the way home, via a tailwind, I managed 17.9 mph average. And the first day of the year with cycling with shorts on, and not shorts with leggings over the top. O! The joy! O! The freedom. I feel pretty sure now that my cycling ability has a lot to do with how warm it is, rather than any other reason, as pondered over in previous witters and drones. It was in fact a real relief to find that I could still get to work and back at a fairly decent pace (for me), and that the weather and temperature have a big effect on my speed.

It has felt like a long and dark winter, since the clocks went back at the end of October. All hail the spring. For some reason, when I was cycling along, I was reminded of the last line of a John Betjeman Poem: The Earth Exhales, from ‘Slough‘.

I came across this article a few days ago:

China - Tibet As Justification For Iraq

You may or may not agree with the sentiments, but it struck me as an incredibly powerful article, especially this excerpt:

And then it is we, of course. We - the brave western front of morally corrupt nations that is presently fighting two neo-colonial wars, we who prevented dozens of Latin American nations from choosing their own political, social and economic destiny. We who joined forces with oppressive religious forces and governments in the Middle East and North Africa in order to destroy all progressive movements there. We who basically choked and covered in blood any attempt to create alternative society, anywhere in the world.

There is a lot of truth in those words. We certainly live in a topsy-turvy world of extremes…