Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
‘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.
‘March, the month when magnolias rule our world’ wrote Thomas Pakenham in The Company of Trees, a gift last December that inspired me to test his opinion.
Our local 5 km pandemic travel radius is coast-cropped. We only had access to 37 km2 for exercising and magnolia hunting. I stopped counting after finding over 80 specimens in 26 days of peering into suburban gardens.
March has been a month of many memorable things including three movies. You may dismiss the idea that an octopus could be dreaming of electric sheep but you shouldn’t ignore these three utterly different expositions of the cinematographic arts.
I used to print photos as scarves on fabric but guess what? The supply of sustainable fabrics such as lyocell became erratic even before the pandemic. My small start-up business faltered and was suspended when the last two week turnaround took order almost two months to fulfil.
Have you ever heard of Robert Gregg of Colorado? He’s connected to the eighth wonder of the world, in St Petersburg, in my mind at least.
Gregg died in 1991, famous among ant lovers for having written the seminal book The Ants of Colorado published in 1963. He identified and was allowed name many ant species in Colorado during his decades of searching them out.
The grim news is that tuberculosis cases are up 25% in the first year of pandemic. This was predicted by people who could see how dangerous the diversion of resources to Covid-19 would be.
It was so obvious that I mentioned the risk of a rise in TB in a May journal last year. ‘The curse of tuberculosis is that it’s thought to be a disease of the poor’ I wrote.
