Through the window

The rain here seems to be interminable. The birds in the garden have been battling through the wet to try and get food.

Yesterday evening we put up a bird feeder, and this morning the sparrows had already found it. 

Between the downpours a bee made a foray into the lavender.

Bees in the garden

25 June 2012

Life cycles

Hi ho Silver

Cowboys play cricket too!

The last post set me thinking back (over 50 years good grief) to the tricycle complete with tin boot that I had when I was around 5 or 6 years old. A trawl through the internet (wonderful place) and I finally found this image which is the nearest I could get to my first set of wheels.


That blue tricycle became my trusty steed; me as the Lone Ranger, it as Silver, and long suffering brother running alongside as Tonto. I really would have preferrred my cowboy hat to be a permanent fixture. Sundays were a nightmare, not only did I have to wear a dress, the added insult was that cowboy hats were considered de trop for church attendance.  




Two wheels
My father moved parishes and became vicar of a plurality of country churches - four in all.  An enormous amount of work for him, but we were in our element as the rectory that came with the living was huge, with extensive grounds.

Money was tight for my parents but they managed to get my brother and me second hand bicycles. The man over the road did them up and we were thrilled with them. Learning to ride them was relatively easy as the house had front and back drives which joined in a U shape. We were able to start off at the front gate and wobble our way round to the back gate and then repeat the process in reverse.

It wasn't long before we were out and about on the country roads which in those days were relatively traffic free.

Tandems
We had just got married, we were living in Campbeltown, had no car and new husband suggested a tandem would be A Good Idea. It is at these times that you begin to realise that perhaps more thought should have gone into this idea. We got one anyway and then our differing views to exercise became apparent. I worked out that sitting at the back, while having a restricted view point, would mean that my pedalling effort (or lack of it) would be less apparent to the pilot. Not so .... in my ignorance (hopefulness) I had thought that the pedals back and front acted independently and that it would be possible for me to cruise.

The second difference was in our definition of what constituted a steep gradient. Mine was that a 1 in 50 slope was pushing pedalling boundaries, whereas A considered at 1 in 2 as just a small challenge.

Then there was free wheeling, which in my opinion was to be taken advantage of at every opportunity. Not so! Apparently you need to pedal at full speed all the time, even downhill , it's downhill for goodness sake, the bike can do its own stuff without any help!

Our tandem phase did not last long. Our one and only attempt at canoeing in a double canoe did not go well either; not only did I not put in enough paddle power I was totally unable to grasp the idea of how to steer the wretched thing.

However ..... since then I have had more successful tandem forays. On several visits to Edinburgh I would be met at the station by my brother in law with his tandem. The first time it happened I didn't quite believe that he was serious about letting me get on the back (after all, he had heard all the stories from his brother about my total tandem inadequacies). Amazingly I did climb aboard and did pedal; perhaps it was that fear of the number 42 bus looming closer and the realisation that while M was through the danger zone I would need to pedal to ensure my safety! The other good thing was that M believed in a certain amount of freewheeling.


Cycling in Holland - or one of my more embarrassing experiences
My Dutch friends Jan and Liesbeth always made my stays in Holland memorable by arranging wonderful outings, though this trip was memorable in a different way.

The "cycle incident" involved a trip to a nature reserve where we hired bikes. These bikes did not appear to have brakes, it was explained to me that you  braked by pedalling backwards. Not only had I not been on  a bike for several years, I now had this strange mechanism to contend with. So while Jan disappeared into the distance I attempted to get going, and promptly fell off said bike. This was in the car park, and as luck would have it I fell against the one and only car that had people in it. I was mortified, I hadn't damaged the car, the bike or myself, but the look on the car occupants' faces said it all. Luckily Jan had come back to find me by then and was able to explain that this middle-aged woman was  English and  a bicycle incompetent, and everyone (except me) had a good laugh about it all.. The rest of the day went fine though unusually for me, I was in dread of having to slow down or stop.


Lancaster
While I have owned a bicycle for many years, it got very little use until I moved to Lancaster 4 years ago. There are plenty of FLAT and traffic free cycle tracks for me to hone my rather rusty cycling skills. I am now able to multitask, I can now steer AND change gear without the fear of falling off. I have become more adept at avoiding loose dogs and sounding my bell more loudly at  Ipod wearing walkers. Cycling along the canal towpath is still a bit of a challenge, that distance between water and wheels can seem very narrow and maintaining balance on the cobblestones under the low bridges without banging my head is somewhat daunting.

Work in progress, cycling with camera

I've recently got a new bike. Being a fair weather cyclist, it has been frustrating not to get out on it very much. The last one fine day we had when I did go out, hay-makers joined forces with all the other pollen producers along my route and I came back with a week's worth of hay fever.

So today, I tried again along the same route. It was all a bit of an experiment trying out time lapse with my camera attached to the pannier rack.

Clearly there is more than a little fine tuning necessary, but basically, it seems to work. I have already worked out how to get the camera set up less precariously and at a higher level.

As for hay making, there was none, instead in the fields there were the sounds of disgruntled shorn sheep, no doubt complaining at the shock to the system of being deprived of all their weatherproofing. The unshorn lambs now looked bigger than their mothers.

Destination was Glasson Dock and a welcome cup of tea and then to the smokehouse for some smoked mackerel for tonight's tea.

Following strands

Today's Happenstance picture has stirred me up into some sort of action.

Chromosome strands strutting their stuff in an onion root. Unlike us, plants' growing areas are mainly restricted to specialised areas called meristems which are found  in the tips of roots and shoots, and in cambial tissue between xylem and phloem.

Special staining techniques capture the cells' chromosomes and the various stages of mitosis can be seen.

See this article for more information.





DNA, the stuff of chromosomes. Watson and Crick discovered its structure in 1953, basing their model on the X-ray diffraction pictures of Rosalind Franklin. They never properly acknowledged her vital contribution.




DNA garden at Charles Jencks' the Garden of cosmic speculation. I had heard about this garden several years ago. It is only open one day a year and this year I was able to visit it (along with thousands of others). The anticipation rather exceeded the reality .... I'm not sure what I expected. I suspect all the crowds made things less accessible.