Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
Despite the challenges, I consider myself to have been very lucky this year. I have lots of reasons to be cheerful. One of these is that I have reliable sources of book recommendations. So many people have made such excellent book recommendations that have I haven’t yet read them all. And the lockdown is the primary reason I was able to read as many as I did.
I’ve selected twenty five images from among the many that I took this year. And I’ve chosen one as my favourite. I told its story here on Christmas Day and the picture makes me smile every time I see it. And it’s not even a proper photo, four months after the initial idea, it’s a cropped snap from an iPhone. That’s surely reason enough to make it my favourite from the 305 days of this journal.
‘What are you, a sorcerer? / Only at home. In company I drink out of the cup.’
– Take it from Here, BBC radio comedy with Frank Muir and Dennis Norden
One night last week, I’d had a bad night’s sleep, broken by rain pounding on the roof. There were also sheets of wind-blown water crashing over the side of the house. I knew I wasn’t on a leg across the roaring forties in a round-the-world yacht race because the bed wasn’t rocking. But I wondered about the strength of water, the power of the ocean while remembering the damage I’d seen on the keels of maxi yachts on a hard stand in Fremantle. And the cataclysmic noise just above my head simultaneously prompted thoughts about the end of time, which for us as individual sailors, would be the same as the end of our lives.
I read yesterday that George Blake has died. I’m old enough to remember his escape from Wormwood Scrubs jail in 1966 but not old enough to recall his trial with much clarity. I walked past the jail in Hammersmith a few years ago and it was Blake’s name that came to mind. Notoriety is strangely long lived.
It was wonderful to get a selection of books as presents this holiday. One my new treats is this year’s winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Explaining Humans by Camilla Pang. However, I have a few to finish before I can begin to enjoy the new haul. One of those unfinished treats is last year’s winner.
