Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Most nights, Mum will read to her six year old at bedtime. Perhaps a story, perhaps a poem about things that are hard to explain:
‘No one can tell me,We all depend on movements for effect and those effects drive society. A learned friend introduced me to the term ‘kinetic elite’ that describes highly mobile business and political leaders and I guess global geoscience advisors too. I knew that US military still use ‘kinetic operations’ to describe their overseas interventions. With hindsight, perhaps both concepts were aligned when I was jogging around rocky Algerian deserts on fiery summer evenings deep in the Sahara. We’d wait until the temperature dropped to 44 C, then run an outbound 5 km before sunset to avoid dehydration and ensure the return 5 km could complete before total darkness, avoiding the reportable health or safety incidents used as adjunct measures of our job performance. We were among trails used as caravan routes for millennia, ‘kinetic smuggling’ routes perhaps. I was accompanied by security advisor MdS who joked that he was born into the ‘mobility’. I’ll call him MdS because he was a veteran of the Marathon des Sables as well as special kinetic operations. Discreet when not downright secretive, he had mind-bending stories he considered safe to relate to while away a slow evening jog with me.
‘Can you imagine …?’ is how she often starts … I wrote this a month ago not imagining that government had already restarted their harassment of Nurcan Baysal for ‘inciting hatred and enmity among the public’.
[Read more…] about KineticsThe day started with birds; not a dawn chorus so much as a five-alarm dawn clatter. A herring gull has taken to dawn dancing on the flat roof of our bedroom, for the third annoying day in a row. Our neighbour has seen the bird looking in her windows but here, it sounds like it’s doing a pogo though more likely stripping off the roof felt. I might need to use a selfie stick to video the action just in case gull dancing is trending.
A grandson asked a question about the colour of a woodpecker’s beak. He’s five and the request came by a voice message during breakfast. There are a few Great Spotted or Pied Woodpeckers in the trees around his home and his Dad says they’ve stopped drumming recently so maybe that’s why beaks were on Master 5’s mind.
[Read more…] about IsolationismI put some personal waste into a postbox recently. And a few weeks later I received a summary analysis of my DNA and microbiome. I’d thought it sensible to get an understanding of any potential genetic health risks especially since they might affect our children and theirs. And a check on the health of my second brain, my gut bacteria, was long overdue.
Privacy surrendered, I learned many things, among them that I need more inulin. I need to eat things like Jerusalem artichokes and root chicory to get it. The advantage that might accrue from the soluble fibres in inulin could well be a decreased risk of diabetes. Maybe so, maybe worth a try, I thought. Prebiotic and indigestible in the small intestine, inulin is thought to feed the bacteria in the lower gut. A common side effect of inulin is flatulence, since re-confirmed even though I introduced the inulin scientifically. Jerusalem artichokes have always been a windy challenge, so I tried and failed to de-sensitise myself with tiny doses. Cooking them in lemon or vinegar didn’t neutralise them either. Now I’m too scared to try chicory root.
[Read more…] about Post WasteWe’ll be walking to the Somme this day next year or perhaps the year after, pandemic dependent. The day’s walk will be mostly through lands occupied by Germany in 1916, east of the main battlefields of the Somme. We’ll walk south from Bapaume, passing Combles and finishing in Péronne. I look forward to the opportunity to visit some of the sites not out of macabre interest but to remind me just how fragile peace can be. Assuming things haven’t kicked off again in post-pandemic melt-downs.
Still under curfew, I trawled disk drives yesterday and recovered a lot of ‘missing’ photos. Among them were some memories of a month in the Caspian. Ironically, my first memory was my return journey.
[Read more…] about Caspian FishingThe coffee percolator was on the hob for the second time. We’d watched the morning news on two channels between 8 and 8.30 and I’d moved back to the kitchen to read the yesterday’s Irish Times newspaper. The sun was shining on the back deck, dappled through the trees that line our southern fence. Beams of light brought different items into perspective while pigeons continued their cooing. They added a base note to the unusually loud dawn chorus that started around 5 am today and were still at it. I was reading about nightingales singing in Berlin, the no malice-aforethought surge of Covid-19 in nursing homes and the obvious need to rebase existing national debt and double it. Pigeons and nightingales aside, I needed a diversion.
[Read more…] about Exercise Nine