Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
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.
The proud parents showed us her sketch and we were taken aback. This was back in early September. Then, a few days later, we were talking about it while hill walking during one of the inter-pandemic lockdown respites. We talked with the artist about her sketch and how art can involve many media. We joined the artist sketching smiley faces on soft slates with hard glacial dropstones and left the faces by the trail to cheer other walkers.
It’s been cloudy in the evenings this week even when it hasn’t been raining. So I never saw the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn last Monday. Tonight, the weather was very different. A beautiful evening, though cold, and a slightly hazy sunset. The re-appearance of Mars above a waxing moon embroidered the pretty skyscape shortly after the 1610 sunset. I set up the camera and spent almost an hour moving and adjusting my tripod, practicing with numb, gloved fingers in the failing light. I chose to take photographs of some of the many people taking selfies while bathed in the golden sunset.
Another walk, another couple of photographs of the morning that was yesterday.
I was reading about entropy and time just before I went to sleep last night. I was so fired up about what I read that I disturbed my wife’s sleep with some mad ramblings about video frame compression and diffs. Effectively, what I was saying was that, as a kid, I had read so much science fiction about time travel that I’m inclined to believe it’s possible. It’s not that I have faith that time travel will occur, it’s more that I can’t ignore the possibility.
We had a TV breakfast this morning having waited until 0845 so we could watch the sunrise streaming from Newgrange. Of course we knew there’d be no dramatic solstice dagger of light because it was raining through the thick cloud that envelops us from time to time. And the weather radar indicated that was true across the 80 km that separates our 10,000 year old ice-sculpted hills as we watched, sitting less than a metre above the 400 million year old granite bedrock that supports our home.
