• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022

  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Travel Excuses

January 20, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Back when we were free to travel, the simplest of reasons might have been sufficient for us to set out. Leinster Rugby off to play in Castres? Let’s visit Albi, the Toulouse Lautrec Museum and see the game in Castres. We’ll make a proper weekend of it. Such was the opportunity we took this date four years ago.

Albi Side Street © Simon Robinson 2017
Canon 1D-X | Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM | 175 mm | 1/6400s | f/4 | ISO 320 | handheld
MTL © Simon Robinson 2017
Canon 1D-X | Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM | 70 mm | 1/400s | f/4.5 | ISO 1250 | handheld

We were based in London at the time so we hopped in the car on a Friday morning and drove to Albi, taking the train under the channel. We wended our way south for over twelve hours, along the autoroutes through intermittent snows across slushy surface. Progress was slower than planned yet we made it to Albi for dinner, just.

Leinster allowed Castres snatch a draw from the jaws of defeat on a bitterly cold Saturday night but the visitors had done enough to qualify for the knock-out stages. A few months later, I was lucky enough to be able to drive to Lyon after Leinster had progressed to the semi-final, when it was considerably warmer. I drove there with a friend who himself had a friend who put us up in a wonderful house in serious horse and hunting country. This was our host’s reason for living, not to mention his enjoyment of the globally renowned wine and beef options. We lost to Clermont in that second visit to France but I had another French weekend to remember.

Panoramic view Cordes-sur-Ciel from the south © Simon Robinson 2017
Canon 1D-X | Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM | 70 mm | 1/400s | f/7.1 | ISO 200 | 6 images

Things have changed. Oh how things have changed. Even the rugby teams can’t travel at the moment. The idea of driving from the UK to France seems ludicrous after Brexit, and that’d be same even if we still lived in London. The pandemic rages and I rage too at the negligences of most global governments including the Irish version. The Irish government appears to have prioritised mental health, allowed a form of Christmas that included letting people enter and travel around the country. That covidiocy took us from best in Europe to the worst in the world in just over two weeks.

The idea that elected people should be able to make careers in parliaments has never looked more insane than during this pandemic. It also looked insane in the financial crisis of 2008 when unqualified people had the tiller as usually happens in an ‘unforeseen’ crisis. Perhaps the word ‘unforeseen’ is the clue. Perhaps qualified people might be better at predicting the future. And I don’t mean experts, I probably mean the civil service. I certainly mean that a health minister should have medical qualifications of some form, that a defence minister ought to have some military experience, just to mention two examples.

Democracy, or more correctly, the need to be re-elected, is making it increasingly hard to get the right people into crisis management on a timely basis. I spent over four decades in an industry that learned some hard lessons. When I left college, few understood that qualified emergency response coordinators are the difference between the paper plan and implementation. Having seen, first hand, a progression from almost zero awareness to articled corporate rules over several decades, I also see that no matter how prepared a nation might be, the possibility of political intervention has the potential to undermine everything.

Why not let the civil service do its job and let the politicians do theirs? Why not move the Dail from Dublin to the more central Athlone, limit parliamentary service to two sequential terms and perhaps three lifetime terms and finally, not allow cabinet positions to be occupied by people who aren’t qualified for the posts.

Caveat emptor: my daily musings may not be complete let alone correct.

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: france, leinster rugby, pandemic, travel

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Recent Comments

  • Lia Mills on Lady Birds
  • Simon Robinson on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Catherine Dunne on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Lia Mills on Apertures
  • Lia Mills on Limerick Walls

Categories

  • Anchoritism
  • Chapbooks
  • Fake Memoir
  • ManRom2021

Tags

ahmet altan albert einstein bbc birds bird watching booklink bracket books ireland brian greene burma cancer chapbook colum mccann computing Covid-19 dog dun laoghaire fabhappy flowers food geology geophysics hans rosling ireland irish times issued lia mills london movies nobel prize pandemic PEN international photo photography photos photozines plants poetry popular simonscarves the uplift kit travel ungrievable volcano walking walkingcommentary

Recent Posts

  • Lady Birds
  • Rounded
  • Watershapes
  • Machine Driven
  • 2023 Subscriptions

Archives

  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (1)
  • December 2022 (1)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (1)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • August 2022 (1)
  • July 2022 (1)
  • June 2022 (1)
  • May 2022 (1)
  • April 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (1)
  • February 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (2)
  • December 2021 (2)
  • November 2021 (1)
  • October 2021 (1)
  • September 2021 (2)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • May 2021 (9)
  • April 2021 (30)
  • March 2021 (31)
  • February 2021 (28)
  • January 2021 (31)
  • December 2020 (31)
  • November 2020 (30)
  • October 2020 (31)
  • September 2020 (30)
  • August 2020 (31)
  • July 2020 (31)
  • June 2020 (30)
  • May 2020 (31)
  • April 2020 (30)
  • March 2020 (31)

Footer

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Copyright © 2023 · Revolution Pro on Genesis Framework