Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
Individuals often spend without thinking but it’s not something you’d want a government to do. What you’d want to see is a reasoned explanation of the proposed expenditures and the sources of the budget to fund them. The evidence should be documented with no less detail than a judicial summary of a trial. The same care and detail should documented for the management of public health.
‘I want a poem
I can grow old in.’ ¹
Poet and Professor Eavan Boland died a year ago yesterday.
Dear Reader,
I thought I’d let you know how I perceive our planet is doing this Earthday. I can only see a few things from where I sit and while there is much to celebrate, there seem to be some incongruities. I thought a couple worth mentioning.
We were living in Texas when James Burke’s The Day The Universe Changed was first broadcast. The Cold War was still a thing and truth was one of the biggest casualties. Some would say that the Cold War was a modern form of the Dark Ages. That’s useful to consider since the Dark Ages in western, Christian cultures were not quite so dark elsewhere else on the planet.
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.
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?
