Walking Commentary

Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022

ManRom2021

Dispassionate Eye

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I created this chapbook after my van’s side mirror was clipped and broken by a passing truck. I cursed its crossing into my lane on the narrow suburban road. Then I exchanged shards of mirror-glass tidied up from the tarmac. Perhaps I should have exchanged insurance particulars. My thinking was that the delivery truck company would have recorded the incident, establishing their driver’s culpability beyond doubt.

The outer covers for Dispassionate Eye, the 29th chapbook in the series.
Images © Simon Robinson | Campark X30 | 18 mm | 1/3800s | f/2.6 | ISO 100 | cycle helmet mount
Available now from Bracket Books Ireland at outlets like FabHappy or WalkingCommentary.

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Via Graffiti

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I planned to document a bicycle trip from Cheshire to Kent with images of street art. I imagined this afterword would be drawn from street artists’ words and ideas. Yes, I’d expected that murals and graffiti would be ubiquitous. But no, there was less urban scrawl than I’d expected, especially rare in the heritage parklands of the Peak District. Instead, it was the elusive Chiffchaff that inspired us.

The outer covers for Via Graffiti
Available now from Bracket Books Ireland at outlets like FabHappy or WalkingCommentary.
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Day 27 (or not)

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Today isn’t our Day 27 on the way to Rome. We’re not making our 24th hike. The discrepancy is that we plan to rest on the seventh day of every week. If we were out on the trail, it would be categorised as an easy 19 km in the Pas-de-Calais. We’d have set out from Wisques after a good breakfast from accommodation unknown. I checked the weather – cloudy but only 9C. Perfect for a hike and another chat. Assuming we’re still talking to one another.

Bath 20130427. Who knew there’d be a (tenuous) Roman connection to this date in my lifetime?
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Lunar Excursion Anyone?

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It’s sixty years since Yuri Gagarin landed back on Earth. He was found wandering around the fields in Smelovka, close to the Volga River. At first, the world heard how he landed in the Vostok-1 capsule but later, we learned he parachuted clear. Ejection from the capsules was how all Vostok program landings were designed. The rules needed to be changed so that a flight record did not require that the vehicle and pilot arrived simultaneously. It was the Cold War. These things really mattered. And the Soviets had put a man in space first. So they allowed the parachute story prevail until they couldn’t deny it. And the rules were rewritten and Gagarin’s trip stands as the first.

Foucault’s pendulum in the Panthéon in Paris.
I couldn’t wait for the full cycle of just under 32 hours on the 55th anniversary of Gagarin’s orbit.
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Walking Ireland

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Frank Mitchell was the Professor of Quaternary Studies when I was a geology student in Trinity College, Dublin. When he retired in 1979, I was already overseas, working in Sharjah. A few job changes and a dozen years later, I was back in Ireland so to speak. In fact, I was commuting to work overseas and never found employment in Ireland in the coming thirty years.

Chocolate. I’d walk a long way for good Parisian chocolate.
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No Way To Rome (Yet)

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‘We should have walked to Buxton today. It should have been the first stage of the trip to Rome … We’ll do it same time next year .. it’ll be 18 daily hikes before we can catch the Dover ferry to cross to France. And then, well, then it’ll be a mere 96 daily hikes to get to dinner in Rome’ or so I wrote this day last year.

Flawed envelope design.
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