Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
We have a problem in the back garden this afternoon. A pair of Magpies have gone on the prowl. The one was lurking all afternoon in and around the garden. The other patrolled on the roof, often throwing an ominous shadow onto the granite slabs that pave our back garden.
0600 Benedict’s Newsletter: No. 335 arrived yesterday and I scanned it on my phone. 15% of global internet traffic is Youtube and 11% is Netflix – more than a quarter of the traffic. Then I read his essay Covid and cascading collapses. You should too. Ever seen a soufflé collapse when the oven door opens? Technology collapses don’t happen the way you think or remember. And that makes them hard to predict. But what does seem useful is to know is Lenin’s astute observation that you can get a decade of inevitable in a week.
It’s hard to imagine that the sourdough you are creating will be shared across a family network a decade in the future.
But that’s what happened and today I baked a loaf based on a sourdough starter that was 8 years old. This one started from the fermentation of Kilmullen Farm apple juice left over from a wedding and started in the Gate Lodge where the couple lived at the time.
[Read more…] about Sourdough BlissWe once came across a Bourgeois spider, lurking in the old turbine hall of the then new Tate Modern. Maman fascinated and appalled me in equal measure. My scientific self enjoyed the majesty of the vision that re-created her, triumphantly huge in steel. My male, meritocratic self had visions of limited purposes, sacrifice and cannibalism. And yet Maman spoke to me of the fight for life and a guarantee of a future borne in her egg sac, much as when Yeats wrote of rebellion and nationhood in Easter 1916, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’
[Read more…] about Finite Eternity
Yesterday, the mystery was the wind. Today, it may well be teaspoons.
That AA Milne poem came back to me as I photographed a landscape of the Mourne Mountains in the light of last night’s setting sun. I knew I wouldn’t get a sharp image of anything because the air was moving as thermals, returning the day-borrowed heat into the atmosphere. Locally becalmed in our isolation, yes, but the Mournes are 100 km distant. All of that radiating heat becomes a cooling and distorting visible haze over that distance of an evening.
[Read more…] about Mourne SunsetMost nights, Mum will read to her six year old at bedtime. Perhaps a story, perhaps a poem about things that are hard to explain:
‘No one can tell me,