Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The doorbell rang. Standing there, masked, was a highly ranked chess player. He was delivering a plated lemon drizzle cake. Almost surreal except that his very good wife had made it for us as a diversion from worrying about our daughter going through surgery at the time the cake arrived.
We walked for an hour or so in Marlay Park today. ‘Here’s where the Wicklow Way starts’ I said, as I’ve said before. ‘Perhaps I’ll walk it this coming weekend?’
‘No, you need to build up to long walks first’ was the sensible reply. This is fair because I’ve been off the trail for over six months and with six decades under my belt, everything needs to be measured.
A book hit the mat this morning, dropping from the letter box. The Dublin Review announced itself with a satisfying thump. The 80th edition has an essay by Lia Mills which I read again. I write ‘again’ because Last Word originates from this household and as biased as I might be, I still think it’s a great read this second time, my first reading having been just before it was submitted.
The period after the Great War was, for Europe at least, a time of great insecurity. Governments and gangsters both struggled to maintain order.
Back to 2009 when we were visiting Navan, seat of the county of Meath. The TV was on and it was very tense in the living room. Five of us were speechless with worry. There was a Welshman standing in the middle of a rugby pitch in Cardiff. His job was to kick a rugby ball some 48 metres, to pass between uprights and over a crossbar that holds them in place. He was exhausted, as was every player after 80 gruelling minutes of ferocious, non-stop action.
‘What good is a newborn baby?’ asked Benjamin Franklin in 1783 when people questioned his enthusiasm for the recent invention of hot air ballooning. His predictions that the balloons would become significant for transport was unusually wrong. 250 years later, Loon is a balloon system in the news for delivering the internet in Kenya and elsewhere. Balloons are helping transport information.
