Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

Anchoritism

Memories of Being Short

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RTSP

I remember a schoolbook from when I was eight and nine. Reading To Some Purpose, always abbreviated by our teachers to RTSP. I understood that RTSP was easier to say but if you were reading to some purpose why would you abbreviate it? And why only RTSP? Why wasn’t there a WTSP? Weren’t we also being taught to write to some purpose such as expressing ourselves?

Which reminds me of catechism. The teaching style of the era involved learning by rote and one of the things to be learned was catechism. We had to learn the rules of being catholic from a green book of rules.

This Morning’s Walk in Dún Laoghaire.
Foggier than yesterday.
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Life Tripped Me Up

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‘Life tripped me up’ is a line from a poem dictated in Turkish over a phone line from a prison, a series of which have held the poet since he was 21.

Participation in a protest over the government’s treatment of Kurds sent him into a cell as a young man. He confessed to crimes he had denied before torture that has left him scarred for life.

His pre-trial detention lasted for twenty-two years before his sentence to life imprisonment was confirmed. He wrote recently that he ‘can’t touch or communicate with other people or animals’.

Tern Freedom Denied Others
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Despotism and Contagion

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Saturday was another busy day in our ongoing limited isolation.

Breakfast was depressing. Our granola and coffee were excellent and the eating of them a luxury afforded more by ongoing luck than planning.

It was the continuing bad news of the devastation and the absence of leadership in Beirut that was upsetting. It was like watching a rerun of the clean-up after Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. That was another disaster accompanied by excellent meals for remote observers. Unless I’m wrong to believe that many of us consume our news at meal times.

Reading bench (after Lutyens).
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Fifth Sunflower Poker

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I was watching a viral video of a 45th President trying to persuade journalist Jonathan Swan of an anti-virus response that was ‘better than the world’. That’s when one-time boss of Salomon Brothers came to mind. He was a securities trader who traded on your mortgage without security.

Michael Lewis wrote of John Gutfreund that it ‘was easy for Gutfreund to say money didn’t matter. He paid himself more than any chief executive on Wall Street … His attitude … towards the firm changed once he had cashed in his chips. He and others ceased to view Salomon Brothers as an instrument of wealth creation and began to treat it as an instrument of power and glory, a vast playground in which they could be the bullies.’ Liar’s Poker (1989) is still worth a read (or re-read) if you want to learn more about leaders who don’t let morals get in the way of anything.

The Ugly Library of Good Readings
Dún Laoghaire © Simon Robinson 2020
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Time Changes

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There was a time when those travelling to Dublin or Belfast were treated equally badly in Heathrow or in any British ‘mainland’ departure point. All travellers were downgraded to being a threat. Everyone going to the island was treated with equal suspicion. Much the same happened in the US after 9/11. The terrorists know that the threat of terror always costs society more than the terror itself. Threat is the real terror. Threat leverages a cognitive bias. Humans are very poorly equipped to deal with perceived fears.

The bedside table remains busy.
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Imagined Futures

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This time next year, a week short of entering Rome on foot, I hope to be resting for a day in Viterbo, between Lakes Bolsena and Bracciano. Each of these lakes occupies the caldera of a dormant volcano and I will enjoy the sight of them.

‘So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true, that doesn’t mean it is true.’ (from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman).

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