Becoming Bridget Jones – Cycling After 40 – Bird-Spotting – Agricultural Machinery – Borders – Not Thinking
On some of the rougher sections recently I have been turning into Bridget Jones. I’m planning blog entries that start:
Holes in road avoided by fanatical scrutiny of road surface: 43,718
Holes in road hit by cycle due to momentary distraction of interesting scenery: 952
Holes in road unavoidably hit by cycle despite fanatical scrutiny of road surface: 657
Items of interest in surrounding scenery missed due to fanatical scrutiny of road surface: unknown
Sid found an article in a bike magazine the other day on “Starting Cycling After 40” which gave a list of things to avoid. Most of it was the usual stuff about “don’t believe you will win the Tour de France tomorrow” and very little of it said “see if you can find a lycra jersey large enough to stretch over your big fat tummy”. However the rather depressing phrase was “If you are starting cycling in later life…”. Later than what? We are fortunate to have been able to do this trip at a time when many people will still be thinking “a few more years and I’ll retire” but we don’t think of ourselves as O*d. Odd yes. OCD, it has occasionally been observed. But “Old”, what has that word got to do with us? It is very interesting to see the Grey Pound around us on this trip, there are a lot of long-distance cycling pairs of a Certain Age. Fortunately we are younger, more nimble, better looking etc etc and we almost always have less luggage.
We like bird-spotting, we are pretty rubbish at it but we enjoy it. As for so many activities we have ended up with individual specialisations – Sid spots the birds (not as easy as you might think) and Doris knows what they are. However the further we travel into undeveloped Eastern Europe, the easier Sid’s job gets and the harder Doris’s job gets. So we end up relishing birds we know – a stork and its two largeish chicks on a telegraph pole; swifts/house martins dive-bombing a street full of insects – and then marvelling at large brown birds of prey while saying “that must be a buzzard”, or hearing a cacophony of calls from the Danube banks and saying “oh listen, ducks of some sort or maybe frogs”. Must try harder.
As we move deeper into south-eastern Europe, the agricultural machinery is changing. We made an early gaffe in old-Eastern-Germany by giving a chap driving a vintage tractor a big thumbs-up and then later realising it was his everyday machine. In Hungary we started to see horses and carts occasionally and in Serbia we are seeing very, very large prairie-sized fields being maintained with vintage tractors and hand-weeding. In Hungary we also started to see lots and lots of people carrying strimmers around on bicycles (a strimmer is a big old piece of kit once you sling it casually over your shoulder on a bicycle) and we also saw our first person using a scythe to cut grass. There is a lot of grass-cutting going on here, Germaine Greer would be having a fit. (I will leave it to you to Google “Germaine Greer don’t cut the grass”, don’t say that I never bring any excitement into your dull little life.)
And as we have made our Bonkers way on our vaguely south-eastern route across Europe, I am reminded again how arbitrary some of the country boundaries are. We come across significant geographical shifts from time to time – the passage into the Czech republic when we were suddenly surrounded by pointy wooded hills, which carried on into the upper stages of the Danube; the emergence onto the massive (and, sorry God, massively dull) Danube plain, the area round us in Novi Sad where the Danube starts to cut between larger hills – but the humans’ border lines just become squiggly marks across the landscape.
But on the other hand we have seen some very clear border changes, sorry I didn’t post this at the time but here is the end of the Netherlands super-engineered cycle paths, looking back from the German side of the border. We’ve also tried to be hyper-aware of different road rules on give-way-to-cyclists… from the Netherlands’ rule that “the cyclist is king” to Hungary where “only the weak give way” whereas here in Serbia it is “don’t kill them in the towns but they are fair game in the countryside”. Actually at one point in yesterday’s flog across the plains we saw a memorial site which was probably to a dead cyclist, I imagine his family saying “we would have sold the bike but the local farmer is still finding pieces of it turning up in his plough”.
And that’s when I am thinking. For vast stretches of the past five days I haven’t been thinking at all. As the old saying goes, “sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits”. There is a limit to how much the brain wants to process about the view from a dyke-top cycle track (trees, grass, tarmac, sky) or a cross-prairie road (crops, tarmac, sky, traffic). I did start to wonder about the number of accidents arising on the post-Budapest part of the Danube Cycle Route when cyclists simply fall into a stupor and slide off into the ditch…