This traditional new year’s day ride is perhaps the first ever without gloves or any kind of headwear under my helmet. I could so easily have forgone the knee warmers too. Crazy times. Much more typically, however, the farm tracks are awash with muck and the detritus of recent floods. This is strangely reassuring.
A lot of work has been done cutting hedgerows too, and the pay-off for dodging hawthorn fragments is the newly opened vistas that give the occasional glimpse of otherwise hidden gems of houses nestled behind briefly bared trees. In the hedgerow by Little Loxbrook a detached stub of branch remains wrapped around a fencepost around which it had grown, the rest of its limb rudely sliced above and below. As I ride past it looks like some ghastly decapitation left as warning to others.
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