Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Things repeat if you journal every day for more than a year. This, for example, is my second International Women’s Day. Last year, I wrote of ‘… stories out there about the hordes of women trapped into unrecognised care roles. You know these women. They are your sisters and your daughters for whom these roles are harder to accept than for your wife, mother and grander-mothers.’
I admitted here recently that I had aspired to kayak around Ireland. A week later, Michael Viney had an article in the Irish Times that caused me to acquire a story of an actual journey around Ireland by Kayak. The secret sauce.
I walked from Westminster to Primrose Hill on this date in 2019. I walked past Regents Park Zoo, drug dealers and The Beatles’ Apple Studios. I didn’t see any tourists searching for Freud, apart from me. Over by Abbey Road, the street was alive with people taking selfies on one of the most famous pedestrian crossings in the world.
Many say that the Irish coastline is about 3,200 km long. Others believe it to be perhaps 6,347 km. Or maybe it’s closer to 16,000 km. Distance perception was on my mind as I was photographing the Muglins and Kish Lighthouses yesterday because The Kish lighthouse always seems relatively near on a clear day.
Imagine imagining publishing a book that would sell for £16,500 per copy. I mention ‘per copy’ lest you think that’d be the price for the whole print run. Yes, The Sistine Chapel is a brand-spanking new, limited edition, three-volume book available now from your nearest Callaway Arts & Entertainment supplier. I’d ask ‘wtf’, ‘why’ and ‘who’ but I think you probably beat me to it.
I took this image earlier today. The low angled morning sun turned the roiling green sea to jittery, jingly, shimmery brown. The wind was howling so I used the Dun Laoghaire pier wall as a shield. I set the aperture to f/16 to maximise the depth of field, set the shutter to 1/1000 to minimise the shake with the big lens, handheld on a windy day. Then I overexposed the distant lighthouse with an ISO of 3200. And hoped the two image stabilisation technologies – OIS in the lens and IBIS on the sensor – would do their thing.
[Read more…] about Not Just Another BookThis day eleven years ago, trapped for the weekend in Uxbridge by heavy snow, I thought I’d walk to Windsor for lunch. Some 16 km and five hours later, I was cold, tired and very hungry. I’d missed Sunday lunch by a few hours so I settled for a dinner before catching the train back. But trains that serve Windsor don’t go by Uxbridge so it took a few hours to return. I’m glad I did the walk because the Berkshire countryside was utterly transformed in a way that I only saw that once.
