Beware Old Blokes on Bikes.

Remember the two horses and a donkey in Mill Lane to whom I fed some fresh hay recently? I went to see them again today, only this time I took them an apple as a special treat. They weren’t there.

What was there was an old bloke on a bike who stopped and insisted on talking rubbish to me for at least twenty minutes. I hate that, you know. I do my best to be polite to tedious people, but the pressure of constantly nodding and saying ‘mmm’ gets to me after a while. His main bleat was about the fact that farmers make the road muddy, and the second was an extended rant on the fact that the contents of slurry pits are full of toxic chemicals which give you cancer. And then he asked ‘Are you a farmer?’ At least I was able to exercise different muscles in my neck and answer ‘no’ to that one.

But he persisted. He wanted to know what the blocks of yellow stuff were that were loaded on a trailer being pulled by a tractor.

‘Straw,’ I replied. ‘It’s the stalks of cereal crops.’

‘Is that for feeding to the animals?’

‘No. Straw’s for bedding. They feed the animals with hay or silage.’

I was expecting the next question to be the obvious one: ‘What’s the difference between straw and hay?’ I think he’d reached the limit of his learning for one day, however, because he didn’t ask it but rode off and left me rueing the fact that lunch would be taken later than I had anticipated. But not before he’d told me that he was 79.

It struck me that I might be 79 one day. I’ve long said that I don’t expect to make 80 because no male that I’m aware of in my family ever has. You never know I suppose, but I can’t say I really fancy it. I might be persuaded to get a bike and ride around irritating people. Do you now see why I tend to be reclusive?