Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

Archives for March 2020

Fathom

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19 Mar 2020 – noon GMT – 7°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland

We are exercising to stay fit. Outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, conveniently called a fathom in English. An anatomical unit of measure like cubit nor passus. Not really six feet either but once measures were standardised, it became six feet, then the unit of depth via weighted plumb-line measurements and now, I’ve got to the bottom of it. The largest of the anatomically inspired units. From a time when social isolations were the norm. Today we might call it 1.8288 metres but that requires a standard for the metre that we can’t carry with us. A metre today is the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299 792 458 when expressed in the unit m⋅s−1, where the second is defined in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs. Imagine meeting a German who knew the ‘faden’ to be 1.7 metres or a Swede who used the ‘gamn’ for 1.784 metres or buying a length of silk from a Dutch trader selling in ‘vadem’ units equivalent to 1.818 metres. Reminds me of the international response to the Covid pandemic. Each nation cutting its cloth to its own measure despite globalised funding for a World Health Organisation. We know the metre was proposed by the French who defined it as one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris. Not every country uses SI units and of those that do, some spell it differently. Thank you to China and South Korea for leading the way on Covid transmission mitigation and suppression. Sorry that global cooperation remains immature.

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Mobiles and body heat

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18 Mar 2020 – 23:03 GMT – 3°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland

Here in Ireland, schools are closed. So people are out walking with their kids. I was walking on the beach earlier and I noted a few personal distancing issues. People on mobiles seem less able to maintain the social gap. Self importance still prevails. And the gap requested may not be big enough. Shampoo, deodorant and perfume wafted over me. I guess I’m already personal space sensitised. I noted proximity because today was cold and my ear lobes could still detect the body heat of people passing at more than one and a half metres.

I have had a cold the last few days. I looked at my FitBit today and was surprised to see the resting BPM tracked when I was feeling low and when I thought I was getting over it. In fact the daily BPM was rising for a few days before I noticed.

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Capital Ring

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17 Mar 2020 – 9:42 GMT – 10°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland

This month last year I was walking the Capital Ring around London. I made seven it in outings over two weeks. Walked clockwise, starting in Woolwich, averaging about 20 km each time. It helped that we were based in SW1 at the time and each walk could be accessed by a radial journey on public transport, age and residence making it free to me after morning rush hour.

Snippets from WhatsApp with the family, posts made by covenant to confirm that I’m upright when walking alone; a protocol following an incident on a mountain last year that left me with pins in my hand.

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Remodelling tax

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16 Mar 2020 – 15:25 GMT – 10°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland

A little vent is long overdue. I’ll try to avoid it becoming a rant. My irritants include a boiler, a grant and trust.

But let’s digress immediately. Why would an electrician wire electrical sockets in one room to two different breakers? In a domestic house, semi-detached and quite small. And why would each of those breakers also be wired to sockets in other rooms, one even on a higher floor? Of course, the house was wired with earthing as it should have been. Just one detail was overlooked, there was no connection to an earth rod.

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Kalends and Ides

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Caveat emptor: the things that flow through my consciousness are not always pleasant, complete let alone right.

The Romans left quite a legacy. Is that because they took the time to chisel their notes in the stones they built with? Calendars were a great invention and the Roman version remains dominant in global diplomacy and business. And it’s fundamental in many administrative regions of the world. Taxes tend to be assessed on 365 day years despite domestic use of different systems such as lunations in Muslim and Mosaic households. The ‘ides’ notion probably lost appeal after Brutus backstabbed Julius Caesar in 44 BC. And besides, Shakespeare told the world to be wary of them.

Hard to avoid thinking about calendars in a leap year. And reflecting on calendars brings time into view. And view is the right word. We lived for a while in the coyote-barking foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. Our zip code was the unforgettable 91011 which I could never remember, near where the astronomer Edwin Hubble spent the late 1920’s. He developed a view of nebulae fleeing from his 100 inch telescope. We met many who worked in Nasa’s JPL and Caltech and all spoke with passion of their pursuits of galaxies, now that they knew what nebulae were.

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Planning in a pandemic

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14 Mar 2020 – 9:18 GMT – 7°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland

Planning in a pandemic
You can’t. Accept it.

No travel bookings made. No accommodations booked. Can’t say the walk off. It’s not off so must plan as if it will happen.

Bought and assembled my hiking kit. Completed that task this week. Added gloves and another fleece. None of this is cheap: it’s an upfront investment in maintaining health rather than saving for later expenses for poor health. Fingers crossed for longevity.

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