Gated Road

I have mixed feelings about nostalgia. I think it can be very negative: a retreat from modernity, reality, the necessity of change. As a country, I fear we have suffered from nostalgia since the death of Queen Victoria - always looking backwards and lamenting what we think we have lost, always blind to the realistic possibilities of the present. It's why we still have a parliament in a dilapidated, dysfunctional building, and why half of that parliament is unelected. It's why we never succeeded in committing ourselves to a united Europe of equal partners. It's why we still buy and sell things in pounds and pints and acres, five decades after we claimed we had replaced them. It's why the houses built in the village in the last ten years are a pastiche of the ones built in the 18th century 

I went out on two wheels for the first time in four weeks - I'm not shattered, so I think I have to count myself recovered. I've said before that I use the bike as a time machine. I think I mean a nostalgia machine - seeking out the sleepy corners where I can pretend I'm in a lost bucolic idyll. Today I found a road with many gates, no edges, ancient potholes and grass down the middle - and no cars of course. I didn't know there would be a herd of these - that was the sparkly icing on the sentimental cake

I'm pretty sure this is a dairy shorthorn - the breed that provided most of our milk before the coming of black and white cattle a century ago. If I'm nostalgic about them, it's not a nostalgia for anything I've actually experienced - it's a strange longing for the world of John Constable, or the exaggerated prize animals depicted in British Folk Art. While the emotion is restricted to the escapism of a morning cycle ride, it's fine. Back in the real world, the rates of depression and suicide among the farming community are rising alarmingly - modern problems requiring realistic, humane rural policies, not steeped in any kind of nostalgia

The extra is unconnected with any of this. Today just happens to be its moment, so I took a picture