Wednesday
24th
February light to fresh N Sunny 5 to 7C
The frost is thick and the air is cold as I cycle along
the A10 north. A bird flies over becoming a year tick that I had
expected to have on the year list weeks ago, a male yellowhammer. It
lands on one of the very few bushes to be seen some distance away.
This chalky landscape is dominated by immense cereal fields with few,
if any hedges.
Through Royston and on towards St Ives. A green form of
transport passes me with a hello and turns further down the road, a
speedy horse and cart.
Into St Ives I am just about to enter a shop when a lady
comes up to me and inquires as to whether I recognise her voice! I
did and the memory of meeting a couple who were waiting for their
cycling son to pass a roundabout in Cheshire last April came back.
Their son was cycling for a homeless charity in Cambridge called
Winter Comfort.
“John,” I asked. I had remembered. We, Janice and
I, went for a coffee and a chat. Janice was in St Ives to look after
her 90 year old mother whilst Jon was at home in Dorset. I love lucky
meetings like this and an hour passed before we said goodbye.
Trying to get out of St Ives I took a wrong turn and
ended up on a large maze of a housing estate. On asking a passerby
for directions I was told by her, Chris, that she looked after
orphaned hedgehogs. She took me to her house, introduced me to her
husband, Errol and shown the cages where the sleeping hedgehogs lay.
They had helped hedgehogs for over twenty years, returning them to
the wild once fit and well. They supported the nearby Hinching
Country Park. Kindly they added to the menagerie on my bike by giving
me a cuddly hedgehog, Wilfred Prickles!
So the year list is now at 170, eighteen ahead of this
time last year.
53.51
Miles 1442 elevation up 1686 elevation down
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