Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
I’m not that familiar with Christof Nieman’s work but I occasionally use his website to educate myself. I first saw his work in ‘Abstract’ on Netflix illustrator’s back in 2017 (I date my notes) and I’ve stumbled over his name intermittently ever since.
This is the third ‘shot’ in three days and it comes from a London street. There’s a magnificent Ginko Biloba on Greencoat Place in Westminster that I watched for weeks until the leaves were right. Then the sun had to be right and I waited a day or two more. And so, at 11:05:42 this day last year I was standing beneath a yellow bough that is just higher than the single decked buses that pass three or four times an hour.
I have lots of reason to like this picture. Chief among them is that it’s of an echium that lived in our front garden for the usual 18 months. It came from the first seed that germinated, sprouted, grew and thrived from a batch of seeds that was given to us by a very keen gardener and friend who died earlier this year.
I really don’t know why I like this photo of schoolboys I took this day seven years ago.
I come from an island where bigotry was entrenched. I grew up with bigotry occupying the thoughts of many who surrounded me. So many forms of bigotry that today we break them out into prejudices that can be defined and proscribed in law. I don’t think that one or two generations is enough to purge any society of bigots. Time may work but I doubt prejudice can disappear. To be human is to want to belong to families, tribes, corporations, gangs, nations, isms and factions.
I would have written about the necessary culling of a tree in our front garden, but Libran Writer did it so much better that I’ll help you jump to her post.
