Not sure who is the culprit and the object of this rant, but it revolves around the filthy rural roads that I have to ride on at this time of year.
They are filthy because the increasingly large tractors the farmers use won't fit on the lanes, at least they won't if trying to pass anything wider than a bike - and sometimes not even then. So the wheels go onto the soft verges, and muck is sprayed liberally across the road. After a few vehicles have been along, there are the two, narrow reasonably clean wheel tracks, separated by a ridge of mud, hiding a range of thorns and gravel, all sufficient to have me off my recumbent if I am unwise enough not to have planned my ride so as to avoid having to cross this linear mountain range.
The corollary, is that the verges now look like Speilberg's remake of the Battle of The Somme, and the road is barely distinguishable from a ploughed field that's been home to a herd of cows after a couple of inches of November rain.
An modern cars are not much better, although admittedly they don't spread as much muck over the road as a mega-tractor towing a slurry tanker the size of my house. My mum's old Mini was about as wide as an ICE trike. Then came the Elf - n - Safety snowflake generation, with the side impact bars and airbags, all of which means that the current Mini is about as mini as a 1970's Ford Transit.
So whose fault is it? The farmers for buying ever-wider tractors, the E-n-S brigade with ever larger cars, or the councils for not anticipating the trend for ever larger road vehicles and omitting to grub up all the hedges to widen the country lanes into A-road size carriageways?
Whosever fault it is, will you please stop running over the verges at this time of year 'cos it's bad for the environment and it's dangerous to cyclists - especially me.......