Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

Archives for March 2020

Demagogues and Despots

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31 March 2020 – 14:25 GMT – 10°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland

It’s worse than many are being allowed to know. Fortunately our Irish leaders (who were voted out of office in the February national election) are concentrating on saving lives before jobs. And our opposition politicians appear united in supporting the outgoing government rather than political point-scoring to influence the outcome of talks on a new coalition government. Commendable behaviour. Reassuring in an age of demagogues and despots. And then there are some evangelists who believe they summoned help and that HE came down among them and eradicated the virus from The United States this past weekend.

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Learning from the dog.

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30 March 2020 – 20:29 GMT – 7°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland

You’ve met our dog Gus in a previous post. He suffers from separation anxieties yet still looks to the bright side of life. He does so without the concept of zero, suffering no anxiety for its absence. Now, I only have one olfactory bulb. I know I lose more by my limitations than does Gus for his.

Dog bowls don’t need zeroes. Empty. Full. Is. Isn’t. Now. Later. Happy. Sad.

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Crosswords and Sudoku

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29 March 2020 – 20:39 GMT – 1°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland

It’s that kind of day. Cleaned some windows. Watched the news on TV while my wife visited with a public health nurse to learn about injecting our daughter, in case she needs the help later in her treatment.

I’ve been practising social distancing. I think the best defence is to behave as if you’re infectious and do not want to infect anyone else.

Fascinating catch-up TV about Eel Pie Island. As often as I walked past it while doing Thames Walks, I had no idea just how important it was to the music of the 1960s.

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Just because of paranoia …

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28March 2020 – 19:15 GMT – 7°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland

I was gardening again. Chipping trimmed branches after some clearance. I was working about four metres along our driveway, that is four metres away from the pavement that passes to the front go our home. A woman spotted me as she walked by and moved off onto the road. Perhaps she was thinking about the six degrees of separation? Perhaps she moved because the square root of six is 2.44? I wasn’t unhappy that she moved, just curious as to why she thought our social distance needed to be so large.

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Strange Day

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27 March 2020 – 21:28 GMT – 7°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland


Chemo for our daughter started today. We’re the drivers because everyone else has children whose awareness of contamination has yet to develop. Only the patient can go into the hospital. The same hospital in which our neighbour is in palliative care with widely metastasised cancer. A cruel situation for her, separated from family. And cruel for her kids and grandkids. Less cruel for our daughter in absolute terms but it’s hard to consider absolutes when you’re sick

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Omniscient Kingfisher

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26 March 2020 – 19:50 GMT – 7°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland

I had wanted to acknowledge the great printer #normanackroyd on his birthday but Covid-19 meant no one was around at #eamesfineart to help me understand fair use had I used one of his prints on Instagram. I’d heard the BBC Radio 4 broadcast earlier of an Ackroyd interview by Robert Macfarlane while Ackroyd continued to work. Acid etching and heavy printing presses made for fascinating descriptions even unseen on radio.

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