… was set off by one particular lightning strike and peel of thunder last night. It was.. impressive.
Otherwheres had a much more intensive storm than did the Cardinal and I. Here we got good thunder and loads and loads of sheet lightning, but just the one real Roar From Thor. We had rain too, monsoon-esque rain for a while. It wasn’t wind that brought the leaves down from the hedgerow and trees, for there was none – it was the rain.
Today though it’s back to hotter and more humid than ever, and it’s as evil as ever it was. At 0500hrs this morning the temperature was in the mid-seventies, and the humidity was registering “ugh” on the von Richthofen Scale.
Today is one of those days that ain’t not never no how going to be “clear” – there’s a haze of dampness about it that’s here to stay.
The sun rising through the hedgerow was not a friendly thing…
…and to be honest, the cows didn’t look as though they wanted to snog a boater either…
The ducks were friendly enough…
…although Nanny was a tad horrified at the scant regard that these two snacks ducklings had for the matter of human-avoidance.
The humour-free anglers who spent most of yesterday drowning worms in the canal to our stern – under the high-voltage cables overhead, in an area specifically signposted for that reason as “No Fishing” (sic – I think they mean “angling”, but don’t know the very real difference, and do not seem concerned by the matter of insult to real fishermen) – had gone. I wonder how they’ll find their way back to their favoured spot, since the only local landmarks of any note seemed to be a crisp packet, a water bottle, the plastic bread bag (of the sort that often finds itself around amateur-made butties), and a drained bottle of Lucozade… I’m sure they’ll remember, somehow.
Between them the Canal & River Truss PLC Ltd and the Wynbury Anglers thought it a splendid idea to bung up a notice telling such anglers how to obtain their local license – nailed to the post that prohibits angling because of the overhead power cables!
You do have to wonder, don’t you?
This reminds me of Australia, where all of the signs warning not to approach the water’s edge because of crocadildos or agilators or some such… were all in small print and down by the water’s edge. Where the signs saying “Road Closed” were two hundred miles down an outback road – because, logically, the road wasn’t closed until that point…
So, before I melt, I shall leave you with a couple of arty-farty photographs of the Memorial To The Unknown Lycra-Lout, which is just a few yards away from where I am moored.
The Unknown Lycra-Lout came to grief – from the look of the rust – many years ago, when all of the spokes on both wheels just disappeared, poof, gone! Spokeless and never called me “mother”. Spoke-free. Perhaps this is a spoke-free zone of some sort? Tis lucky then that I don’t need Mr Stove at the moment.
The Honda velocipede is slowly becoming one with the undergrowth. Resistance is strong, but ultimately futile. This too will become one, with the Hawthorne.
It is a bicycling peril that I had never had my attention drawn to hitherto; the possibility of sudden and disastrous unexplained disappearance of the wheel spokes.
You learn something every day. You may not want to, but there it is.
Incidentally, if any of the Greek and Roman gods are reading this – if you could see your way clear to cooling things off a little please (by twenty or thirty or forty degrees of the effs) then I’ll be most generous indeed when next at the Temple. Sesterces won’t come into it – cool things off for me and I’ll be handing around the half-crowns with abandon.
Chin-chin &etc.
Ian H. Overheating ‘orribly, again.
The Diesel-Electric Elephant Company. 
Thor hasn’t been down in Sussex yet, but we expect a visit from him and Mjolnir sometime this weekend.
The hedge seems to be doing a reasonable job of eating the bike, but the mystery of the spokes remains.
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Put out a plare of sandwiches and a jug of beer – that’s the best way to attract Norse gods.
The spokes are a bit of a Toyah Willcox. All neatly removed. The frame itself and even the seat don’t look bad, I would have thought that they held some salvage value too. Just shows how little I know about velocipedes! I wonder whether I ought to get some little sign made up declaring the piece to be a valuable art installation… then it might be removed by some light-fingered oik. 😉
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Is there no one keeping the abandoned junk from accumulating? Seems a bit too pinch penny of the trust. They will find no one wants to use the canals once they transition to junk yard mode instead of idyllic water ways.
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The Canal & River Trust are the usual mix of any corporation (it is a Limited Company hiding under the guise of a registered charity, with directors and half a dozen faux-eminent quarter-wits who are supposed to oversee the charitable aims) – the grunt workers and the thousands upon thousands of volunteers do sterling work, but the “leadership” is a bit of a chocolate chastity-belt. Metropolitan and snowflake to the core a lot of them wouldn’t know a cruiser or a narrowboat if you moored one in their morning-commute choc-mocca-coconut-soy-fat-free-foamed-latté.
The grunt workforce is too busy reactively patching up the creaking system with too few resources and no leadership, while the (putative) leadership are too busy putting rolled-up socks down their lycra pants for the latté-soaked morning commute into SUSTRANS’ offices. The published accounts make interesting reading. The once-proud Inland Waterways Association, the group that orchestrated the saving of the canals from total ruin many many decades ago has descended into the form of a bickering hate-group (aside from one another, the chief object of their bile and ire is boaters such as myself, who live on the canals).
The canals are in fact an accurate exemplar of England (and Wales) from greasy tip to ingrown toe!
Aside from this I have no particular or strong opinions… 😉
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As I started reading this post, Thor & Co opened up the thunder and rain boxes here in Hereford – 15 minutes BEFORE the weather app said they would – a letter to the relevant authorities is next on my To Do list.
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A damned stern talking-to is what they need after allowing the weather to fall into such disarray of late. I shouldn’t be surprised if I don’t have their departmental Christmas Party cancelled this year.
Torrential wind and howling rain and hail gone here – for the moment – leaving just constant sheet-lightning and the rumbles of thunder. It’s all most exciting. 😉
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This hedge art by CaRT is fascinating and seemingly left there for some time and could very well be bespoke. The short-range (i.e. this week) weather-fortune is to get coolier and coolier, thankfully, after today. All this heating us up and easing it off has to be a new torture method to brainwash us don’t you think? Keep the wet flannel flying high.
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Well there we go – just had not just a breeze but torrential rain/hail and lashing winds! It’s still hot and humid though… and dark now, it’s dark.
The breeze was a bit spooky. I was enjoying the slight cooling off afforded by the clouds, reading on the back deck, when suddenly the trees all rustled… It reminded me of a sci-fi film that I watched a few years back where the trees were killing humans by waiting for the right breeze and then trees upwind would emit chemicals to cause deady death-death…
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Do you think the hedgerows could be bit more pro active and reach out to seize and engulf both bike and rider?
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I have been spending not some little time and energy attempting to train them to do just that – one sniff of speeding lycra, one shout of ‘get out of my way’ and it’s all over around here, yellow jersey or not… 😉
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