Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
I’m fascinated by how one image can be manipulated to shape different stories. What is the essence of a shot given that there are an infinite number of photographs you can take from where you are reading this? Are there an infinite number of stories to be found in one shot?
This day eleven years ago, trapped for the weekend in Uxbridge by heavy snow, I thought I’d walk to Windsor for lunch. Some 16 km and five hours later, I was cold, tired and very hungry. I’d missed Sunday lunch by a few hours so I settled for a dinner before catching the train back. But trains that serve Windsor don’t go by Uxbridge so it took a few hours to return. I’m glad I did the walk because the Berkshire countryside was utterly transformed in a way that I only saw that once.
That’s Slieve Donard, the third highest peak on this island, snow capped as it was this morning.
[Read more…] about Authority or OpinionLike all dogs, Gus is getting slower as he ages. His main pump is failing; slowly but inexorably. If you accept that there is there is a relationship between the mammalian heart rate and overall life expectancy, you will already to know to expect late life heart issues for otherwise healthy pets. This may say nothing about their enthusiasm. For example, Gus loves the snow and today, he was out and about, running on snow and slipping on ice. He was segmenting and ranging on familiar paths, back and forth, excited by the snow while I was taking photographs. Today’s ambition, for me, was to take a series of high dynamic range photos of relatively mundane subjects as I walked quickly around our local hill.
Surplus
You instinctively know how to gauge restaurant sizes or bus capacity by seat count rather than floor area. But would you buy farmland by the hectare or the number of goats it can support? We humans make value assessments in our personal lives all day long and rarely pause to question if the way we do it is appropriate.
It was back in 2003 when first I read that John Pilger had won the Sophie Prize. He was surprised, to judge from the tone of his acceptance speech. His journalism has always been quite outspoken about the imperialist and colonialist agendas of many ‘western’ countries like his native Australia, the UK and of course, the US.
