Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Yeasts as carbon dioxide strippers. What a concept! Suddenly you are thinking of National Collection of Yeast Cultures in Norwich or the Center for Bread Flavour outside Brussels? Wrong countries. I’m thinking of Austria. But first, we’ll need to go to the UAE, Oman and Cyprus where you might be able to see rocks soaking up CO2.
What is yellow? The autumn leaves of the Ginkgo biloba on our back deck are yellow. After a lineage of more than two hundred million years, we may have first encountered it as an occasional leaf appearing imprinted on the coal we burned in our fireplaces. You may know that botanists classify plants into five groups. You may not know that in one of those groups, there is just one curiously different, lonely surviving species, Ginkgo biloba. It seems a bit unfair that the lone-member ginkgo ended up in two small pots in my homes, one the coal scuttle of my youth, the other a planter currently in our suburban garden.
Sometimes you travel a long way to see more than rain. Best bring an umbrella because the destination should be better than the journey.
It seems I was wrong about how sunflowers transport their water to the tip of the plant. I have just read that science doesn’t really know how a tree transports water from the soil to the crowns of trees. Ask yourself the simple question I forgot to ask: how does the world famous redwood called Hyperion get water to its crown 115 m above the ground? It must be properly hydrated given that it’s over 900 years old.
People say that Wordsworth wrote in praise of the early morning in London, saying that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’. That was in 1802, half a century before before the The Great Stink changed the way London used the River Thames for waste management.
The Dalkey Archive features a swimming spot from when it was for gentleman bathers only. It was in a cave near there that De Selby encountered St Augustine and surrealistic visions of eternity. This was the Vico Swimming Club, a real place I frequented as a child and student. Today, some call it The Ramparts. Others call it the Vico Baths. Yet others call it The Men’s Bathing Place despite today’s gender neutrality.
