Peter Rhodes on bluebells, puzzles and burying the countryside in rubbish
Trigger warning: this column is a bit bluebell-heavy.
The bluebells are early this year, which suggests that April maybe wasn't as cold as we thought. My wife and I celebrated the annual display by wandering through a little bluebell wood a couple of miles from home. It was a glorious sight even for a colour-blind old rambler like me so goodness knows how luminously radiant it must appear to normal folk.
Nothing spoiled the moment amid those bluebells, not even the endless rumble of traffic on the by-pass a quarter-mile away. Traffic noise in the countryside has not bothered me since the spring of 1981 when we holidayed in a remote Scottish forest close to a gigantic waterfall which roared and thundered incessantly. After a couple of days, one of our party pointed out that “it sounds just like the M6” and from that moment to this if I hear the intrusive drone of traffic in the wilderness, I kid myself it's that Scottish cataract.
