Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

A Novel or is it?

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The past is done. I can’t change the fact the first president of Israel was born in Ireland. No more than I change that he was born on the island of Ireland as distinct from being born in a unified nation of Ireland that does not exist. He appears to have taken troubles with him, created by a mitosis that produced two daughter troubles.

The future may not be done but it seems that while the die is cast, those who will die are never finalised. I cannot change the fact that Israel will annex more Palestinian lands from the West Bank this week. Teflon Netanyahu has vowed it. Entrepreneur Trump supports it. Some agencies have warned that this is a war crime. Is a war crime wilful if such opinions are ignored? Is a crime during time of war different to an act of war?

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Argan Oil

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Funny how even the size of a word on a bottle of shampoo can float memories back to the surface. ‘Hair Shampoo with Argan Oil’ was written on a bottle on the shelf in front of me while I shaved. Glasses off, ‘Argan’ is unclear yet unambiguous. My subliminal messaging retrieval kicks in and I’m back in a restaurant pouring an Argan oil dressing on my salad. I was there with five other colleagues. It had been a long day towards the end of a complicated three month geophysical project. We had been recording two dimensional profiles in a hunt for commercial hydrocarbons.

Morocco 2012: 15 sappers check a 15 m path for landmines.
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Alamo

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Once upon a time I felt like a surrealist sitting in front of The Alamo. The grackles were coming to roost in the live oaks, squawking and whistling and chirping. The crepuscular light also brought hordes of bats who appeared from the west and I wondered why no one worried about a rain of droppings.

I missed the photo of a lifetime. A woman walked past in a full black hijab over an iridescent blue burka. She crossed the street in front of an illuminated Cinderella-themed wedding carriage drawn by two white horses driven by a mock lonesome cowboy.

A Twighlight Blurry Storm Coming Cinderella Lonesome Cowboy snap on my phone
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Bolivia III

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The lake has gone. And with it, an oral culture that lasted thousands of years has evaporated too. Lake Poopó is no more. 3680 metres above sea level, 1000 sq km of water has become a story of evaporation, desiccation and devastation.

A lasting memory is the shimmering pink line at the furthest edges of my sight. The heat haze rising from the salar distorted the lines of flamingoes diligently feeding on crustaceans whose pigmented carotenoids tinted their feathers pink. An earthly aurora andinus is gone. So too is the oral culture of honking birds that pre-dated the arrival of the humans that silenced them.

Lago Poopó near Untavi 1994
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Thursday

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We walked Dún Laoghaire pier before 9 and were rewarded by the diving of gannets and terns into the slack tide.

The mean tidal range in the harbour is about 3 m while the difference between the lowest and highest astronomical tides is recorded as 4.7 metres. An amazing feat of engineering, this was in 1842 the largest man-made harbour in western Europe.

Then I moved a few kilometres south to watch people fishing from Dillons Park. Constant change is the reality of living by the sea.

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Plenty of Times II

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Gamma ray bursts are flashes of gamma rays that hit our planet quite regularly. They can last for fractions of seconds or minutes. They can be detected from enormous cosmic distances.

Back in April 2010, a satellite detected a 10 second GRB burst. That’s ten seconds of gamma rays that we now know travelled 13 .7 billion years to reach us from a supernova in a galaxy that occurred about 630 million years after the Big Bang.

Ardmore Hotel: Ceiling and Floor 2014
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