Archives for August 2020

Resentments

August 13, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I was educated amidst resentments. Equality was a threat to the more equal and in Ireland, the more equal folk had a code word for denigrating the less equal. The code word was and is ‘begrudgery’. I grew up scared that begrudgery would undo society while the more-equal missed the point entirely.

Begrudgery is all about identifying resentment. It is resentment but it is also a pejorative term for the alleged resentful. And I wonder if begrudgery could itself go pandemic to become the single biggest threat after Covid-19.

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Controlling Robots

August 12, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

New gatekeepers have emerged to fill the vacuum created by a media increasingly needing ‘likes’ for a codependent life-support system based on advertising revenue support. Such codependency is maladapted and objectivity is a price the media seem prepared to pay. The Bellingcat group is good place to look for accurate reporting. But how did we get to needing citizen journalists for our truths?

This Morning’s Walk in Dún Laoghaire.
Third and final view, it was clearer than yesterday but not quite Summer.

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Memories of Being Short

August 11, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

RTSP

I remember a schoolbook from when I was eight and nine. Reading To Some Purpose, always abbreviated by our teachers to RTSP. I understood that RTSP was easier to say but if you were reading to some purpose why would you abbreviate it? And why only RTSP? Why wasn’t there a WTSP? Weren’t we also being taught to write to some purpose such as expressing ourselves?

Which reminds me of catechism. The teaching style of the era involved learning by rote and one of the things to be learned was catechism. We had to learn the rules of being catholic from a green book of rules.

This Morning’s Walk in Dún Laoghaire.
Foggier than yesterday.

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Virtual Rome Journal

August 10, 2020 by Simon Robinson 3 Comments

Today, August 10th was supposed to be the day we walked into Rome. Two of us, hopefully still friends after a very long talk. 2700 km of talk.

The pre-pandemic plan was to walk from Manchester to Rome. Our departure date was going to be April Fools Day. The idea was to walk an average of 25 km, six days per week. We’d have made 114 hikes over 131 days. We still don’t know where we’d have washed, slept or eaten but we’re pretty sure we would have done quite a lot of each.

This Morning’s Walk in Dún Laoghaire.
A view towards our home neighbourhood, once again cloud shrouded.
The idea of dinner in Rome has a certain appeal today.

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Life Tripped Me Up

August 9, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

‘Life tripped me up’ is a line from a poem dictated in Turkish over a phone line from a prison, a series of which have held the poet since he was 21.

Participation in a protest over the government’s treatment of Kurds sent him into a cell as a young man. He confessed to crimes he had denied before torture that has left him scarred for life.

His pre-trial detention lasted for twenty-two years before his sentence to life imprisonment was confirmed. He wrote recently that he ‘can’t touch or communicate with other people or animals’.

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Despotism and Contagion

August 8, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

Saturday was another busy day in our ongoing limited isolation.

Breakfast was depressing. Our granola and coffee were excellent and the eating of them a luxury afforded more by ongoing luck than planning.

It was the continuing bad news of the devastation and the absence of leadership in Beirut that was upsetting. It was like watching a rerun of the clean-up after Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. That was another disaster accompanied by excellent meals for remote observers. Unless I’m wrong to believe that many of us consume our news at meal times.

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Archives for August 2020

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