I spent the morning on the phone. A long planned, several times postponed – courtesy of lockdown- trip away, needs must be moved again. These things happen. No plan actually survives contact with real life.
Naturally I have just been issued with revised shifts, which, I have already juggled somewhat to get the requesit time off. In fact it was finalised, literally just hours before it became necessary to change plans (again).
So I must contact my work and the cottage letting agency. In an ideal world this woud be 2 very straightforward phone calls, indeed in an “ideal” world the letting agency website would work and I woud not even have to talk to them, however;
My bookings- details- change dates- go to our help section-see our change dates section- my booking – Congratualtions you have change your dates to the same thing it was before.
I successfully do this several times looking for the missing step before I conclude the error is theirs and not mine.
Likewise my work “should” be straightforward, but with new shifts in flux and everybody with holiday to use up and plans to change, it is not a simple matter to establish who, if anyone, is already off, and a very big ask third party over the phone on a busy Monday morning.
I swapped my days, and the letting agency are coming back to me. It’s “probably ok”, so not a wholely wasted morning. Frankly though, it’s hot an sticky and I’m tired and aggravated, and I do not particularly feel like “going for a cycle” that’s the next thing on todays list, however I am aware that yesterday was pretty sedentary and tomorrow I’m driving, so, for the sake of my heart, I wrestle the bike through the house and set off.
I live on a main road, perhaps even part of “the” main road in Kilmarnock. It’s not really cycling territory, nor is the A road to Ayr/Troon/Irving where overaking trucks fly by doing 50 with surprise at this strange (slow) 2 wheel contraption written all over the drivers faces.
However I turn off down a minor road to a little – village is to big- hamlet, settlement? 6-8 houses, and through grazing farmland and the light woods at the edge of an old estate.
The road dips and wind through tall hedgerows older than I am, but at each hill crest, from the vantage of the cycle, I can see across the fields to distant peaks which I know are the mountains on Arran.
Sunlight dapples on the road, and astonishingly, even though I am barely a 10 minute ride from 2 major arteries of commerce, I can detect no traffic noise. Indeed the only sound is the subliminal squeeking of my own bike, and when I pause… the buzz of the insect life is all I can hear.
The pastural silence is a ready balm to my telephonic agravation. I have walked and cycled this route before, but it never seems to have been so quiet, or perhaps – busy with the noise in my own head- I failed to notice.
I circuit round the local estate, in and out of sunlit pastorage and trees, perhaps 2 miles of perfect isolation free of technological intrusion, and it’s the most restful 15 minutes I’ve had in weeks. I should cycle more.
Unbidden, the phrase “gods own country” wanders through my mind, and I acknowledge, that perhaps today, it might just be.
Next week on IaDL ; Some grim mishap, no doubt.
Dalmallyfest the Asylum 