Tonight we managed a truncated standard loop after work. It’s the first time this year we’ve been able to walk in the evening. The time of year for evening walks is finally here. We had to cut the circuit short because walking down the couple of hundred yards from the cattle grid to our house in the dark with the dogs and without high-vis is taking life in hands in an extremely cavalier manner. Cars totally ignore the fact that they are still inside the 30mph limit and consider the road “open season”.

We have come extremely close to being mown down along there on more than one occasion so we have learned over the years to take fewer risks and that means either doing it in daylight or doing it dressed up in the gaudiest of reflective clothing and with powerful torches to alert cars to our presence.

The fact that we are only four hundred yards from a country pub doesn’t help because there is clearly an attitude that in the lanes of darkest Cornwall, outside of towns, drink-drive laws don’t apply. I have, on more than one occasion, pondered the possibility of setting up a tailor’s dummy with a high vis jacket and an old drill or something that looks like a speed gun outside the house from time to time. Let’s scare the shit out of the drivers who so routinely do the same to us without a second thought.