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.