Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
30 March 2020 – 20:29 GMT – 7°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland
You’ve met our dog Gus in a previous post. He suffers from separation anxieties yet still looks to the bright side of life. He does so without the concept of zero, suffering no anxiety for its absence. Now, I only have one olfactory bulb. I know I lose more by my limitations than does Gus for his.
Dog bowls don’t need zeroes. Empty. Full. Is. Isn’t. Now. Later. Happy. Sad.
[Read more…] about Learning from the dog.29 March 2020 – 20:39 GMT – 1°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland
It’s that kind of day. Cleaned some windows. Watched the news on TV while my wife visited with a public health nurse to learn about injecting our daughter, in case she needs the help later in her treatment.
I’ve been practising social distancing. I think the best defence is to behave as if you’re infectious and do not want to infect anyone else.
Fascinating catch-up TV about Eel Pie Island. As often as I walked past it while doing Thames Walks, I had no idea just how important it was to the music of the 1960s.
[Read more…] about Crosswords and Sudoku28March 2020 – 19:15 GMT – 7°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland
I was gardening again. Chipping trimmed branches after some clearance. I was working about four metres along our driveway, that is four metres away from the pavement that passes to the front go our home. A woman spotted me as she walked by and moved off onto the road. Perhaps she was thinking about the six degrees of separation? Perhaps she moved because the square root of six is 2.44? I wasn’t unhappy that she moved, just curious as to why she thought our social distance needed to be so large.
[Read more…] about Just because of paranoia …27 March 2020 – 21:28 GMT – 7°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland
Chemo for our daughter started today. We’re the drivers because everyone else has children whose awareness of contamination has yet to develop. Only the patient can go into the hospital. The same hospital in which our neighbour is in palliative care with widely metastasised cancer. A cruel situation for her, separated from family. And cruel for her kids and grandkids. Less cruel for our daughter in absolute terms but it’s hard to consider absolutes when you’re sick
26 March 2020 – 19:50 GMT – 7°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland
I had wanted to acknowledge the great printer #normanackroyd on his birthday but Covid-19 meant no one was around at #eamesfineart to help me understand fair use had I used one of his prints on Instagram. I’d heard the BBC Radio 4 broadcast earlier of an Ackroyd interview by Robert Macfarlane while Ackroyd continued to work. Acid etching and heavy printing presses made for fascinating descriptions even unseen on radio.
[Read more…] about Omniscient Kingfisher25 March 2020 at 10:31 GMT – 7°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland
I stumbled over one of my photographs of the Mourne Mountains and that made me think of Slieve Gullion. Like Krakatoa and Vesuvius and Etna and Fuji, Slieve Gullion stands proud of its landscape though its a few million years older. And it’s often visible from South County Dublin some 90 km away and it less than 600 m high. Under high pressure conditions, not through today’s spring mists. It stands alone from our perspective, our eyes drawn to it in the same manner that drew megalithic people to build passage graves on the summit
I had the same view as my photograph when my age was in single digits. I remember seeing it once from where I grew up, through binoculars we were using to identify birds among the frames of hundreds of new houses being built at the end of our garden. My father joked “It’s a miracle” because the brown smog of Dublin city was between us and the mountains. The view disappeared shortly after that because my parents let the end of the garden grow wild to block our incoming neighbours from watching us in our kitchen and bedrooms.
[Read more…] about Borders