Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
A book hit the mat this morning, dropping from the letter box. The Dublin Review announced itself with a satisfying thump. The 80th edition has an essay by Lia Mills which I read again. I write ‘again’ because Last Word originates from this household and as biased as I might be, I still think it’s a great read this second time, my first reading having been just before it was submitted.
Back to 2009 when we were visiting Navan, seat of the county of Meath. The TV was on and it was very tense in the living room. Five of us were speechless with worry. There was a Welshman standing in the middle of a rugby pitch in Cardiff. His job was to kick a rugby ball some 48 metres, to pass between uprights and over a crossbar that holds them in place. He was exhausted, as was every player after 80 gruelling minutes of ferocious, non-stop action.
‘What good is a newborn baby?’ asked Benjamin Franklin in 1783 when people questioned his enthusiasm for the recent invention of hot air ballooning. His predictions that the balloons would become significant for transport was unusually wrong. 250 years later, Loon is a balloon system in the news for delivering the internet in Kenya and elsewhere. Balloons are helping transport information.
Every town and city has traffic problems. Most of them arise from evolution. That is to say, the function of the towns has changed with time. Dalkey in South County Dublin is no different.
The infrastructure that is the nexus of any town has a tendency to be outgrown. That’s not to say redundant. Imagine, for example, the horse puckey problems you’d have to live with if the internal combustion engines (ICE) hadn’t rescued us from foul odours, flies and the squelch underfoot. And if you can’t imagine it, consider that history records there were four or five horses for every human when the ICE began to replace equine power. That’s a lot of manure.
Pity the fish.
Hemingway was long presumed to have exhausted his creativity when he produced a novella out of the blue, so to speak. The Old Man and the Sea was first published in just one edition of Life magazine which sold 5,300,000 copies in two days. And that’s today’s story, a tale of five million likes in just a few 1951 days and zillions more since. Not bad for a book the literary critics say is among Hemingway’s least significant works. Perhaps that became easier to say after he had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature on account of books like The Old Man and the Sea.
While on the subject of pity and fishing, here are seven photos of fishing activities and the like around the coast here in South County Dublin.
Is the green apple quicker than the red? Does the green develop faster? Neither are very good questions without a context. That context is a potted apple tree that sits on our back deck. It’s been yielding green apples for over a month. Originally a gift, it’s been there about eight years and this is the most abundant yield to date. It’s an unusual apple tree in that there are two varieties grafted together. Two isn’t so many given the 250 that were in the news back in 2013. But two is enough for us.
