Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
About a year ago, while walking around London, I saw snails massing on the tarmac path in the rain. A short time later, I saw a shrew on the pavement by my feet. The little shrew then left the pavement to walk across the road only to be clipped by a passing car.
I wondered if it was my fault. Had the shrew fled from me? Then again I didn’t build the road, I didn’t build the car. I had just walked and encountered the shrew.
I’m on the mailing list for the The London Review of Books and every now and then their Diverted Traffic anti-news newsletter catches me with an appetite for a morsel from their archives.
While I enjoy these essays, reviews and stories, I savour the memories that they invoke. I’m living a lot of my life in my head at the moment and remembering unusual experiences gives me food for thought and a recipe for journaling.
Our home is somewhere in this photo, Home from Howth. I can see the gable wall peering out at me but I won’t share the exact location in such a public forum. I can also see the house where my parents raised my brother and me over some twenty five years. It’s quite something to resolve such detail across eleven kilometres of sea.
You will also see Bulloch Castle at the bottom, about a fifth of the way in from the right (or west). I also think it’s quite something to look back in time to the fortified building style needed by Cistercian Monks during the 12th century in order to protect their fishing rights.
I want to be considered a rationalist but I find it very hard to defeat the hormones that often provoke me to irrational responses. I don’t want to be accused of being an alarmist but there really are some cataclysmic things we should worry about.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had a truly original thought. That said, this is consecutive journal post number 180. That’s six months of nothing new every day. If journaling was darts …
Caveat emptor: my daily musings may be incomplete and incorrect.
Today’s photo was taken across Dublin Bay through haze this day three years ago. The digital haze clearance and clarity adjustment has introduced an unnatural light effect that is curiously attractive. I had been introduced to the MTO lens the year before and I finally made my way back to the owner with a Canon adaptor. I liked the idea of a 1000mm lens so much that I bought a second hand copy I saw sitting cheaply in Mr CAD Photographic in Pimlico. My MTO-11CA was built in November 1993 from the 1950s design and I’ve already journaled some results from when we lived in London.
[Read more…] about To 180 and BeyondI was up around 3 am, my sleep disturbed by the winds of Storm Francis. In a quiescent period, I saw some of the Pegasus constellation behind the scudding clouds. The myths of the winged horse came to mind when I saw a virtual box described by four stars in the southwest sky. For no reason I can think of, I recalled that Pegasus carried Bellerophon into battle against the fire-breathing Chimera.
