Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

The Wall

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I had an apartment on the outskirts of London with a balcony that overlooked an office block and its ground level car park. More accurately, I could see the offices when proximal Whitebeam trees had shed their leaves. The office block and car park was empty for a few years until reopening under the flags of third level education. This was part of a British education initiative that delayed school leavers from entering the ranks of the unemployed while earning serious money from foreign students taking their studies in English.

Balcony View
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London West End Photo Walk

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I was walking around the west end of London this time last year. Freely walking around, no mask, no gloves. It was few weeks before we’d depart for Ireland and I took a few photographs simply to amuse myself. Little could I have imagined how walking around, taking photographs wouldn’t be considered an essential task for much longer.

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Glass Wasp Factories

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We visited Peter Layton’s London Glassblowing emporium this day last year. Having been there many times before, we specifically returned to watch Olga Alianova demonstrate how she makes some of her jewellery. Her work is exquisite and isn’t just jewellery. Her mounted wasp factories are reminiscent of the paper wasp nests under the eaves of our home in Houston many years ago.

Olga Alianova workshop in London Glassblowing 20191130
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Russell Fruit Salad

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Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty, that Chinese hostages held by the great king Kaniska introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word ‘apricot’ is derived from the same Latin source as the word ‘precocious’, because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.
– Bertrand Russell ‘In Praise of Idleness’ in In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays (New York: Norton, 1935).

Fused glass bowl from Avening Glass Art
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I Told You

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‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite’ is Spike Milligan’s epitaph. ‘I told you I was ill’ are the enduring words that recall his death in 2002, except they are as Gaeilge.

Some ornamental things that caught my eye this day 2016.

‘A Úachtaráin agus a chairde’ said Queen Elizabeth II in Dublin, at a State Dinner in her honour in Dublin Castle in 2011. It was hosted by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese and that’s why the visiting monarch opened saying ‘President and friends’.

Martina Devlin has a story in today’s Independent that is quite surreal. It’s about an Irish language epitaph on a headstone that has been blocked in the UK. ‘In ár gcroíthe go deo’ which means ‘In our hearts forever’, would seem to be at risk of persisting ‘in our courts forever’.

The head of the Anglican Church spoke in Irish without translation and yet, her ecclesiastical courts have consistently ruled that Margaret Keane’s epitaph in Irish must be translated to avoid misinterpretation.

If I was a UK citizen in Northern Ireland, I would see this as an insult. I would treat this as an affront, a direct insult to me, to liberalism and to freedom of expression. I’m not a UK citizen and I’m pretty worked up about it because there is a history of mistrust. Like a natural resource of enmity and bile, this Anglican Church appears to mine a seam of bitterness and bring confrontations to the surface. One could say it suggests that the society the Anglican prelates represent are sliding back towards medieval if not authoritarian thinking.

It’s a disgrace that the Church of England should deny Irish speakers of British citizenship the right to express themselves in their own language. It’s antediluvian and harks back to the worst of Victorian memories when the poorest of British subjects in Ireland were allowed starve to death else forced to emigrate. It’s hard to prove causation or understand the 1840s imperial thinking but some argue that it was helpful to reduce the numbers of subsistence farmers, that it was a necessary step towards clearing the lands so that agricultural practices could be modernised. Some have said that Stalin learned from this program in creating the Holodomor of the 1930s.

A chairde, words matter and their language matters too.