Recent injuries

I still have a small scar on my leg from when our dishwasher bit me a week or so ago. To tell the truth I cannot blame the machine itself as the injury would not have happened had I not got a text message from a friend who lives locally telling me that the aurora borealis was visible in the sky to the north of us.

Up to that point we were having a quiet evening, dinner was over with and bedtime wasn't too far away but on receipt of the message I took immediate action so that we could watch the spectacle ourselves. (This is our friend's picture, not ours.)

To anyone who has never seen the aurora I should explain that the coloured light that appears in the sky is not dazzlingly bright. In fact to see it at all you will need to be away from other sources of light. Street lights and external house lights really need to be absent to see it properly and unless you live in a remote light-free area your chances of seeing anything at all are very slim. Then there are the eyes. We humans do not generally have good night vision so we tend to live in an environment that is artificially lit at night and if we move quickly from a brightly lit place to somewhere dark then our eyes need time to adjust, our pupils expanding so as to let in what little light there is. Until this has happened we are almost blind.

But the aurora is worth seeing, so my first reaction after receiving my friend's message was to turn off all the lights inside our house, a perfectly natural thing to do. The problem was that at that moment Kate was emptying the dishwasher and on being plunged into darkness she left the kitchen to find out what was going on. Having explained my reasoning we agreed that our garden would give us the best opportunity to see the aurora and it was then that, whilst walking through the kitchen towards the back door, my shin made contact with the open door of the dishwasher. Ouch! I didn't see it because my eyes were still adjusting. Even once I had hobbled outside into the garden my vision was still impaired but fortunately I missed falling into the pond although there were a couple of stumbles into our raised flower beds.

Injury number two, a small cut on my arm, was incurred some days later whilst folding up our wallpaper pasting table. We'd been helping some friends out by wallpapering a bedroom with lining paper so that it can then be painted in colours to suit their young daughter's taste. Our pasting table is a heavy plastic thing which folds in the middle and needs wire stiffeners to stop it collapsing in use. I have no idea of how the injury occurred but noticed the red stuff leaking down my arm as we were packing up. Suffice to say that a plaster soon stopped this and I didn't need surgery. The folded pasting table is both heavy and awkward to carry, which probably explains how I managed to strain a muscle in my back whilst carrying the thing downstairs after we had finished papering. In future I shall treat the thing with much more respect since clearly it has it in for me and has a taste for my flesh.

Sometimes it is better to focus upon the injuries we have avoided rather than those incurred. I am thinking now of my recent adventure up onto the roof of the house when the chimney cowl needed replacing. I chose a calm, rain-free day for the job, mainly because I knew it would involve my standing on the peak next to the chimney, the highest point of  the roof.

The old cowl had disintegrated and the remaining bits had been flapping about in the wind for several weeks making a clanking noise that could be heard inside the house. By the time I got up onto the roof using an extending ladder, most of the cowl had blown down but I still had to remove the remaining pieces and throw these down into the garden before fitting the new one. All in all I thought it went rather well and I am happy to report that despite the recent strong winds it is still sitting up there on top of our chimney. What this does prove is that, statistically, climbing up on the roof is safer from injury than wallpapering. Who'd have thought that!

The most annoying little injuries we seem to attract are those caused by one or other of the plants we have growing in or around our garden, most of which have spikes which are just waiting for human skin to come their way. Gorse is a top contender along with bramble and both of these will leave tiny pieces buried under the skin that are difficult to remove but irritate constantly.

Beyond our back garden fence the land is wild and uncared for, a jungle of gorse and rhododendron.

Some of the gorse has grown tall as it tries to reach the light and after a long period of dry weather this creates a fire risk close to our boundary. Clumps of gorse's spiky leaves are highly inflammable things, particularly when they are dry as they contain volatile oils and flammable resins. To reduce the risk I have been cutting out as much of the gorse as I can. Some of the trunks are six inches thick and will end up as firewood once they are dry but the smaller twigs and gorse leaves will be burnt in various stages in our garden incinerator. My thick leather gloves protect my fingers as best they can from the spikes and also from the heat of the fire. Injury avoidance again.

Whilst engaged on the gorse cutting I could not help but notice a thing of quite amazing beauty that the plant hides within its stems. The close up shown here of a freshly cut gorse trunk reveals a pattern within the tight grain that deserves better recognition. This hidden feature is right beside us inside every plant and by chain-sawing through the stem I have revealed its innermost secret.

Yet more cycle trip planning

One of the lessons we learnt last year when planning our cycle adventure is that it pays to book early. Train and ferry prices seem to have this habit of jumping up if one leaves it until close to departure. Lesson number two is that our cycling bodies, covered by clothing we wear whilst riding and supplemented by what we can carry with us on our bikes, require a minimum external air temperature of eight degrees centigrade. (Many might disagree with this but we have many years of experimentation to back this up.) So our optimum departure date will be governed by the temperature we can expect to meet at that time. We have learnt over time that this probably rules out any date before mid April but similarly we do not want it too hot nor too crowded which rules out the summer months when we'd be facing fleets of holiday makers. So eventually we settle for an early May departure which seems like a good compromise.

We begin watching videos on YouTube made by other cycle tourists and pick up various tips which are useful to know. One of these concerns the way trains in European countries accommodate passengers travelling with bicycles. Somewhere along the way this gives birth to a Plan C, one that involves travelling by train from Amsterdam to the end of the EV15 route in Switzerland and then cycling back down the Rhine river towards Holland. The attractiveness of this is obvious - rivers always run downhill making this an easy ride. The batteries on our electric bikes would hardly need charging at all! With this in mind we start researching train times with a view to making a booking before the price goes up but this soon presents us with a problem. On leaving Holland all the trains we would need pass through Germany and although they do have spaces for bikes we discover that these must be reserved in advance. Train tickets for passengers can easily be purchased online but reserving the necessary spaces for our bikes is not so simple. In fact we cannot discover how to do this at all! All the websites insist that this must be done but none explain how to do it. All very frustrating. Plan C goes on hold.

Whilst pondering this we digress into something equally important (to us) which is to  think up a name for our cycling tour. Our home is on Loch Fyne, the ferry leaves from the River Tyne and our planned route follows the River Rhine. So there we have it: The Fyne Tyne to Rhine tour. It makes perfect sense (to us).

The more we research 'bikes on trains' in Europe, the more confused we get. We really don't need the uncertainty of wondering whether our bikes can travel with us whilst we are on holiday. Then simply because we have tried to find out how to book such a train journey we find that the Internet is now bombarding us with organised cycle touring holiday offers. But we want to be able to ride where we want and at our own pace so the thought of dong this in company with a group of strangers does not appeal. This rules out us signing up for any of them. So no Plan D then and with Plan C fading into the background we are left with Plan B as our favourite. Nice and simple. Train to Newcastle, ferry to Ijmuiden, then start riding at our own pace going where we want to go, planning little more than a day ahead and pausing when we feel we need to.

We know that the whole holiday will be weather dependent so doing it this way means that we can easily stop and hide away if things get too bad. By way of example, the image here is produced by the UK Met Office and shows warnings covering many parts of the UK as another named storm passes over us. Our own plans must allow for something like this occurring, unlikely though this might be.

Next in the planning process comes the list, or should I say, multiple lists. Anybody going away on holiday must have a list, even if it only exists inside the brain. Our homes are equipped with things that satisfy our everyday needs and we rely upon local resources (shops) for other things. Once we are on our bikes cycling away from home then those everyday needs must be satisfied by what we carry with us. Shops can still fill in the gaps but when travelling there will always be uncertainty as to whether we can find what we need so our basics should always be riding with us, stuffed into panniers or other bags attached to our bikes. Things that can fulfil those basic needs cannot be forgotten, left behind at home, which is where the lists come in. But we are not novices. For our Holland Adventure last year we prepared lists and these come out again to use as our starting point. Items are broken down into categories - clothes, non-clothes, pre-departure tasks... to list them all here would be boring. Suffice to say that this is an essential, not to be missed, part of the planning process.

Finally I should confess that yesterday evening we booked the ferry! Two adults plus bikes. There's no turning back now. We just have to get our bodies fit enough to pedal our bikes on and off the ferry, the only problem at the moment being the weather we have had for the last month; endless cold easterly winds bringing clouds which hide the sun away completely. This is not normal for us. We live on the west coast of Scotland and our weather pattern normally brings us wind from the Atlantic lying to the west of us, generally wet but milder in winter than the country lying to the east. Somehow this has all gone wrong and there is no change in sight, according to the forecasters. Riding our bikes in these cold winds does not appeal.

Another mad idea!

It was a fine winter's day, one of the shortest of the year, which dawned frosty and cold. One of the features of living amongst the hills is that the sun takes longer to rise above them to begin warming things up. On this day it was nearly ten o'clock before the sun first hit our house and there was very little heat in it when it did. Despite this, I was tempted, by the clear blue sky and the almost total absence of any wind, to go for a walk on the hill opposite our home, the one that faces away from the sun and receives almost no direct sunlight at all at this time of year.

The ground was frozen solid, a thin layer of frost covering what little grass there was on the twisty path going up and then, on the descent, this frozen surface posed a real risk of slipping on the steeper parts. The cold air penetrated my lungs but the effort of walking up hill was more than enough to keep my body warm and encouraged me to keep going. Was it all worth it? Well yes, and this view is the reason...

At some point on my journey up or down I began reminiscing on our cycling tour of  Holland in 2025 and wondering what the coming year, 2026, might have in store. We love our electric bikes and the Dutch adventure had taught us that they are perfect for long distance touring. We have decided that 'bikepacking' as it is known (carrying camping gear along with everything else and staying at campsites) is a step too far for us but finding a place to stay overnight is what we did before and is not necessarily a problem. We learnt so much from last year's trip that by now even the thought of leaving Holland for somewhere a little hillier doesn't scare us at all. We rarely used the electric assistance on our bikes in Holland but we know that the boost it gives us going up hill means we can tackle almost anything.

For example, just supposing there was a cycle route that started in Holland at the mouth of a river where it flowed into the North Sea and then followed that river inland, eventually to its source. Well it just so happens that there is such a river, the Rhine, that begins its journey in the Swiss Alps, passes through Germany then into Holland passing through Rotterdam to reach the North Sea at the Hook of Holland and rather conveniently there is a marked cycle route that follows this river. It even has a name; EuroVelo 15.

But let us be realistic. The entire route is 1,450 kilometres long and the source of the Rhine is 2,345 metres above sea level so the chances of us riding the whole thing in one go are slim, to say the least. But who says we have to; there are no rules here. We could decide at any point that we have done enough then turn around to head down river for home (all downhill?) or else maybe jump on a train to travel back to our starting point. Hardly surprisingly, now that this crazy idea has entered our heads it will not go away and it has kick started the long process of planning: Where do we leave from? How do we get to the port of departure (something that was quite convoluted when we did it last year)? What time of year should we go? Do we need to learn to speak German?

Our tour of Holland last year began in Ijmuiden, the ferry port that serves Amsterdam, and our English port of departure was at North Shields, the mouth of the Tyne near Newcastle. Ferries for the Hook of Holland sail from Harwich in the south of England so Plan A involves us driving there carrying our bikes and making use of long term parking while we sail away on the ferry with just the bikes. Questions about how safe our van would be, left on its own whilst we are away, come to mind and the long drive to and from Harwich does not sound appealing but it could work nevertheless. Then suddenly another idea comes to mind. Why not start the 2026 tour as we did in 2025 by sailing to Ijmuiden from Newcastle then cycling down the Dutch coast from there to Rotterdam; Plan B. We talk this through with a dear friend who, amazingly, would be willing to transport us with our bikes from home to a train station so we can travel from there to Newcastle as we did before. This would relieve us of the burden of getting to our nearest station, some eighty miles away from home. In our minds we are transported back to the start of our 2025 tour, to the moment of our arrival in Holland, when within ten minutes of leaving the port we joined a beautiful fietspad (cycle path) that ran through wooded coastal sand dunes and we spent the whole day marvelling at the cycle friendly infrastructure that surrounded us. Plan B is beginning to look quite attractive. It is inevitable, of course, that there will be more versions to come and these will be documented fully, for those interested.

Devices

A new meaning for an everyday word - device: a thing made or adapted for a a particular purpose. Today the word tends to be used to mean portable electronic computing devices such as smartphones and tablets. As these things become endlessly cleverer there has been a drift away from the things we used to call 'PCs', personal computers, that needed a desk to sit at and required wires which connected a screen (a 'monitor') to a large box often found resting on the floor underneath. The box would hum away as it stored emails, letters and other precious stuff whereas today these things are automatically 'uploaded' from a phone using something we call the 'internet' and end up in a place from where we can easily retrieve anything with one simple jab of the screen. The physical location of our 'data' is a mystery to most of us - we don't need to know - and why would I need a monitor today when I can easily send the image on my smartphone to the television screen across the room without getting out of my armchair.

Just recently, however, we have identified some flaws in the transition process described above. Over my many years of using computers I have replaced one with another several times as my needs have changed or the machine itself has ceased to function. Each time, in order to ensure my data is not lost, I have copied things to other storage media which have then been tucked away in a cupboard. Some of these are DVDs, which stands for Digital Versatile/Video Disk, a form of data storage invented nearly thirty years ago. Then there are SSDs (Solid State Drives) which go back even further. None of this would have mattered had we not decided to 'have a bit of a clear out'. This phrase describes the process of digging around in cupboards, climbing up into the attic to see what is there, going through boxes full of old papers and letters relating to long forgotten events and throwing out what is no longer relevant to our present day lives. It was whilst engaged in this tiresome task that we came across the historic data storage media, loads of them full of more bytes than we would ever try to count, and this presented us with a problem. We are, after all, talking about information, pictures and recordings of things that were once part of our lives so before throwing them away we naturally want to know what is there. The problem for us now is that to do this our present day devices, tablets and phones, must be able to connect to a device that can read a DVD and we must also find the right wires to attach our present devices to an SSD so it can be read.

At this point I am inclined to abort the mission and think of other uses for the pile of DVD disks that are now littering the dining room table. They are shiny attractive things that might be better used as ornaments or perhaps even reconfigured as a nice wall clock. So let us put them back in a box for the time being and focus on the SSD thingy.

The devices we use every day in our home are called tablets. They have a small socket at one end (or on the bottom depending on their orientation) which takes a particular type of plug, one that had not been invented when plug-in memory devices were first conceived so I am forced to dive into my box of old leads and connectors to see if I can botch up a solution. I have a single, slightly more modern SSD device, which I can connect to my tablet quite happily but at first they will not talk to each other. It takes much more experimentation with different leads before finally my tablet shows me the content on the device it is talking to, and I am presented at last with hundreds of files, pictures, emails, documents of all shapes and sizes. I find a comfortable chair to sit in and begin the long process of reviewing everything to decide what I want to keep and what I can delete. I am looking at history here, years of stuff filed away just in case it might be needed sometime in the future. It is as if the future has now arrived and I am trying to make the decisions I put off making all those years ago.

The whole process is tiresome and rather pointless as I shall probably never look again at what I am storing away. And if I did, the chances are that the technology will have changed again to create a new set of problems. Oh, then I get a message telling me that my online storage is nearly full and would I like to buy some more space. Once again I speculate on where in the world my data is being stored and how on earth we came to believe that every photograph taken by anyone with a mobile phone (used by 70.1% of the world's population) must be uploaded to a data centre when these things are in total consuming 1.5% of global electricity demand. We might try to limit our domestic energy consumption by switching off a light or turning the thermostat down a  degree or so but I cannot see anyone proposing a move towards moving and storing less personal data.

Having said all this I return to my box of old papers and wonder whether I should use the discarded stuff as a homemade firelighter or whether it might be better used as compost for the garden. Either solution will avoid simply throwing it away.