Please join me in a story of ghosts. If you come with me, you will start by travelling back 30 years to a computer room in a leafy tropical suburb near where two Burmese leaders Aung San Suu Kyi and General Ne Win lived in their different confinements. She was at home on Inya Lake, held there because of an internationally decried house arrest. He was also in his lakeside home, confined allegedly because of ill health but really because his puppets were slowly side-lining him before they erased him from history.
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Non-obviousness
I sat down to write about non-obviousness as a thought experiment. I’d cleared my desk of a litter of barely legible notes, making room for a Gedankenexperiment and a second cup of strong coffee. These notes were written in bed in the dark between 4 and 5 this morning. That’s a trick I learned from Lia though it’s taken me twenty years to put it into practice.
Then my phone almost saved me from myself. I was contacted, though not tasked, to see if there were any giraffes in my study. A safari of this kind required I reload an enormous back-catalogue of photos into Lightroom which left me with time and coffee-energy to write up a non-obvious journal entry.
The lower Irish giraffe is a scarf idea for simonscarves at FabHappy
All photographs © Simon Robinson
Future Imperfect
You may have noticed the spine of Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist in a recent photo I posted. There’s a line in it that advises that ‘The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like.’ And with such confirmation I feel encouraged to meld it with an Anne Lamott aphorism that’s infected the web: ‘Every thing that happened to you is yours; people should have behaved better.’
Are these observations deserving of reflection and expression? They certainly contributed to my rereading an older walking commentary blog to see if I’m repeating themes close to my heart and of course, create an opportunity to steal from myself. Which led me down some old paths this morning and a return to a personal favourite theme which is that one’s point of view depends on the view point. Mountain tops become islands if you are looking down from a peak above a cloud filled valley.
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3 Mar 2020 – noon GMT – 5°C Partly Cloudy – Co. Longford, Ireland
This morning I heard buzzard calls then saw three circling overhead as I chatted with glazers who had arrived to bring improved heat insulation to our home. Earlier, two Grey Herons had passed low over the house while I was discussing electrical earthing problems with a visiting electrician. There’s a plumber coming soon to review a drain pierced during the hunt for a suitable route for an earth rod to contact the granite just a couple of feet below.
The buzzard reminded me of a recent peregrine falcon sighting from our kitchen. A day when the plumber was here wrestling with a 1 inch gas main that needed to be run under the house. No, I’m not associating predators and tradesmen.
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2 Mar 2020 – noon GMT – 3°C Showers Nearby – Co. Longford, Ireland
The notion of long distance walking was already in my head in October 2017 when Chris W contacted me out of the blue. University friends meeting again after forty years of divergent life experiences.
I had long hoped to walk from Rome to Madrid, an idea that seemed reasonable when I found myself in Rome in 2010. I had taken a train one Sunday to Naples and walked from the station to the top of Vesuvius and back. Just 50 km but it got me thinking about the communications and logistics in the eras of the Roman Empire, Anglo-Saxon trade, Viking incursions to name a few.
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