April 21st – Another wonderful spring flower coming into bloom is the oilseed rape in the fields. All across the rural landscape this vivid yellow brassica is turning the landscape yellow.
The smell is wonderful and it’s just started. The fields are alive with bee buzz and birds come for the feasting bugs.
I love the drama and beauty of this curious crop
November 7th – Long, long before the wonderful John Cooper Clarke was a sort of cult national treasure doing voice overs for oven chip adverts, he observed the everyday diesel spill on wet tarmac and made it chilling.
‘Revenge is not enough
There’s a dead canary on a swivel seat
There’s a rainbow in the road
Meanwhile on Beasley Street
Silence is the code’
I find easy, cheesy, greasy, queasy, beastly Beasley Street still chilling and an absolute classic, and after hearing it 30 odd years ago, I never looked at the urban terrace street in the same way again – including oil slicks flowing down the Darlaston Road and catching the light.
John Cooper Clark is one of the best performance poets Britain has ever had.
July 31st – Rain is predicted for next week, so Home Farm at Sandhills were taking no chances, and when I passed by on the canal, the oilseed rape was being harvested.
The combine didn’t come close enough for me to work out how it was working, but it blew out a constant stream of chopped plant matter presumably with the oily black seeds threshed out. The machine really was shifting and the whole thing dramatic and impressive, throwing up clouds of dust as it worked.
I’ve often wondered how producing such tiny seeds for oil can be viable, but it clearly is. It seems a long time since these fields were glowing yellow with the bloom of it…
April 24th – It’s not often I cover matters of religious division here on 365daysofbiking, but there’s a time and place for everything. I’ve mentioned before that I prefer a gearhub to derailleur gears; low maintenance, reliable, bombproof. Gearhubs, hub gears or IGHs are a divisive thing – I use an Alfine by Shimano; it offers 11 gears at a 404% range, and works like a charm. The disadvantage is it concentrates a lot of weight at the rear of the bike, and life can get really challenging if they fail.
People get very energised about hub gears, and about the oil one should lubricate them with. Allow me to explain…
Last week I had trouble with my gears not engaging correctly. Often with Alfine units – which run in an oil bath – the slipping indicates that the oil in the hub needs a change, and this one hadn’t been done for about 3,000 miles. As it happened, I was wrong; the adjuster mechanism had slipped slightly when I’d last fitted the wheel and resetting it’s position solved the problem, but not before I’d drained the oil and changed it a couple of times for thin stuff.
The standard oil Shimano recommend is thick. The procedure is to remove a small plug on the hub, screw in a length of pipe which attaches to a syringe, and ‘suck out’ the old oil. I generally leave it overnight to drain. I then clean the syringe with alcohol, suck up 25ml of clean oil, and squirt that into the hub. Because this one hadn’t been done for ages, I used a thin oil, and then reinserted the plug, a rode the bike for a while. I then drained the thin oil the same way. I repeated the process until the oil coming backout was reasonably clean.
Rather than use Shimano oil, which is expensive and goes thick in winter, I decided to use oil by another hub-gear manufacturer; Rohlhoff. Rohlhoff hubs contain more plastic parts than Shimano, so their oil should be OK. It’s thinner, but seems like good stuff.
The Rohlhoff oil also comes with a ‘cleaning oil’, so tonight’s job was to drain the hub once more, and pump in 25ml of cleaning oil. I will ride the bike tomorrow, and then drain it again, before finally pumping in the new oil.
Sounds like a parlarver, but it’s easy, really. I love the hub gears, and sometimes, you have to demonstrate you care.
Say it with oil.
I bet this has made the purists tut their disapproval…
August 1st – Passing Grove Hill near Stonnall in the late afternoon sun, I noted that it was surrounded by a fine crop of oilseed rape. Where this had been a sea of vivid yellow in spring, it was now going a soft, golden colour.
The plant is harvested by special equipment, which flays the pod from the tiny, tiny seeds which are black when ripe. These then go for crushing to extract the oil, both for biofuel and cooking.
There’s gold in those tiny, spherical seeds.
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