Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Richard Brautigan once misled me back in 1974. I enjoyed Trout Fishing in America so much that I read everything he wrote. At one point, he wrote that he didn’t write. His mental blocks were such that he typed, stopped, scrunched up the paper and threw it into the wastebasket. There, in the basket, the words reassembled themselves into a story he never wrote. I put many words in a bag and despite nearly thirty years of incubation, nothing much has hatched.
Imagine a shaggy dog story set in a desert. Let’s call it a shaggy fenec story because of a desert fox that liked chickens that pecked after scorpions and camel spiders.
‘There was an old lady who swallowed a bird.
How absurd to swallow a bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
that wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.
Perhaps she’ll die.’
You can’t read I Will Never See The World Again without being affected by it. I challenge you to read what Ahmet Altan has written especially if you worry that you have become desensitised by the descending spirals of ever worsening news. Perhaps you are inured, worrying that you have a heart of stone. He writes with such elegance and equanimity that I am certain your heart will flutter several times.
Even those of us who are empathy-challenged will be troubled by many aspects of this book.
The weather is most of the problem at the moment. It’s been a very disappointing few weeks of weather. Persistent rain has provided enough water at a time of maximised sunlight hours to invigorate our hedges well beyond their normal confines.
The photographer in me had four excitements today. None could be enjoyed for their photography but there were other compensations to hand.
One Saturday afternoon in Dallas, Texas my heavily first-baby-pregnant wife came into the office to help me rescue some time so we could have a weekend. While I punched cards (yes, it was that long ago), I asked Lia to help interpret some velocity scans. She set about the task after a brief introduction to the technique of selecting time and velocity pairs from patterns in the scans. Her background with x-ray imaging gave her an unusual edge. She was looking at the data as she picked out the patterns within it. She noticed an anomaly and we discussed that this was probably what we termed a bright spot, maybe even a direct hydrocarbon indicator that I thought of as Lia’s anomaly.
We were sitting eating our lunch earlier today when there was a percussive thud from the the French door at the end of the table. A recently fledged Robin hadn’t seen the glass. No immediate or obvious harm, the little bird turned and flew back into the undergrowth. Sheepishly, it seemed to me. Perhaps such a stunning might temporarily cause an avian to adopt mammalian ungulate behaviour.
Texas was almost my first thought because of the memory of a Painted Bunting that crashed into the window of my office long ago in Sugar Land. Almost the same sound today resurrected a long parked memory.
