Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Each night, for the last week, the heady fragrance of trillium has wafted up to the bedroom. Up some five metres comes the perfume from the eight flowerheads. I’m not a chemist but I do wonder about the concentration levels of the compounds that transmit olfactory pleasure over such a distance. I think these things walking in the park when socially distant hair shampoo and personal perfumes waft over me. The fear of covid should have changed us all.
I’m pleased that the Magnolia chapbook has been well received. I’m saddened that I have found another hundred whose blooms have alerted me to their presence. One gorgeous stellata is barely fifty metres from our driveway, hiding in plain sight from my camera. Our national pandemic travel restrictions have been relaxed and today we ventured beyond 5 kms. Almost giddy with excitement, we walked the gardens of Fernhill, some six kilometres from our driveway. It was lovely to be in the company of tall pines, thuya and wellingtonia, spreading birch, beech and oak. We were also among specimen acid loving trees. Huge rhododendrons, camelias and several magnificent magnolias.
Today, our planet has about 3 billion more human mouths to feed than the day I was born. And there will be 3 billion more when my life expectancy is reached, whether I make it to that age or not. It seems that this world has reached a tipping point.
An early morning walk and a pathside discussion with another walker. And I’m at work, scouting sites for the April chapbook. And seeing interesting tones along the way while experimenting with black and white photography.
At last, Dublin latitudes are benefitting from sunlight. We see that in a bed of Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ planted for over a decade under a canopy of trees in the front. Some passers-by have told me they are siberian bugloss ‘Jack Frost’. I’ve also had conversations with passing architects and keen gardeners who don’t know its name. They paused to admire the silver-frosted, heart-shaped leaves detailed by veins and edges of jade green. We have come to think that the perennial appearance of sprays of small, bright blue flowers are the confirmation that spring has arrived. Confusingly, after a decade of reproduction and expansion, some of the frost is disappearing. Warming?Dehybridising? Unevolving? Regressing?
I’m having an epiphany. My moment of revelation actually lasted about ninety minutes. It wasn’t the first time I was traumatised by a television. That happened first in the World at War in the scene where a chicken farmer was splashed by brains. The mood music and laconic narration of Laurence Olivier helped fix this scene forever in my memory. We were shown how the grey matter that had just been thinking terror had sullied the splendid military uniform of a man for whom executions were timed as a newsreel opportunity. Such was Himmler’s power that people slaughtered other people just to appease him. Such was the wilful ignorance in Nazi Germany that this wasn’t considered abnormal behaviour.
