Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The Lives of a Cell (1974) is a collection of science journalism essays by Lewis Thomas, a book that had a profound effect on me. One of his essays in particular stayed with me. It was about the mythological beasts that we create, that persist like the unicorns that inhabit our grandaughter’s fabulous world.
‘The world is too small for the kind of localism that leads to wars. We can have special pride in our country, our language, and our literature, our customs and culture and tradition, but it has to be the abstract pride we have in our baseball team or our college – a pride that cannot and must not be backed by force of arms.’
I read a ton of science fiction as a teenager and continued well into my twenties. My father seemed to be reading almost nothing else, though he also introduced me to Neville Shute and lots of WWII memoirs. SF was fully normalised in our home and I took years to understand how rare it was for households to be looking into possible futures. I am so grateful, with hindsight, that ‘what if’ was the mantra rather than ‘once upon a time’.
I have a strong memory of leaving a pizza bar in the palindrome town of Oruro. The word Oruro sounds like aurora to me though I don’t think there’s any etymological link. Oruro is a mining town some 3700 m above sea level in the southern altiplano of Bolivia. Mining had been going on 400 years when I arrived and curiously, 9 of every 10 people were still of direct Aymara and Quechua descent. Think Inca when the Spanish arrived in The Andes but they were the Tiahuanaco for millennia before that. Which had a great benefit for me since Oruro is the hub of Bolivia’s folk traditions. The boisterous singing and dancing is particularly enjoyable with the local ‘brandy’ Singani and a beer that made for the most terrible hangover headaches.
Yesterday morning, I shaved off my pandemic beard. It was a sunny day with a slight breeze so I took myself to the garden and trimmed it before wet shaving it clean. Not that you care to know such stuff but there it is, I did it.
And yesterday afternoon, I noticed new boreholes in our weeping willow. You know, the kinds of holes you’d assume were woodworm if you found them in your antique table. I sawed off a slice from a branch I’d pruned and paint-poisoned a couple of years ago.
C: If you were in Rome, you’d find that C used to be a hundred. You and I knew that anyway but until today I had no idea that the Latin for 99 was undecentum which might occasionally be written as IC rather than the more standard XCIX. Useful trivia for a pub quiz perhaps?
A problem with writing about business travel is that sometimes you can’t name the parties, Rambler maintains. Such trips are maintained to be solely for business. But experiencing new cultures always exposes new things to see and it challenges a rambler to find the new ways needed to see them.
Rambler maintains that these ramblings solely represent the rambler’s biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual people, places and events and does not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of other ramblers. Rambler maintains, to remind and warn you, that these ramblings may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual people, places and events or experiences of this or any other rambler.
