Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

North View

by Leave a Comment

Views and photographs are today’s story. It starts with sunrise and sunset panoramas taken five hours and thirty-five minutes apart after a four year gap. True north is through the declivity between the two crowns about a quarter of the way in from the right of the lower photograph. My view is restricted on the right by a big cedar and the left is terminated by our window frame. The photographs were not conceived to be perfectly aligned in time or space.

  • Sunrise 04:15 16/06/2020 © Simon Robinson 2020
  • Sunset 22:40 03/06/2016 © Simon Robinson 2016
[Read more…] about North View

Ignobility Index

by Leave a Comment

We heard the siren call of the seals this afternoon. Pod, rookery or harem, there were upwards of a dozen of the pinnipeds basking in the diffuse light on rocks exposed by a very low tide.

It was befitting of Bloom’s Day to see the seals in Sandycove where James Joyce spent six nights in 1904. ‘A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round’ was his description of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Could this have been inspired by the Sandycove ancestors of these seals?

Sandycove Seals
[Read more…] about Ignobility Index

Near and Far

by Leave a Comment

Today was a day in which three photographic opportunities serendipitously presented themselves.

A pier walk in Dun Laoghaire.

The jellyfish and the Black Guillemot were relatively close on our morning pier walk, certainly within 20 metres. The Muglins lighthouse was four kilometres from us and the cargo ship further again. And the Sugar Loaf mountain is 16 km from the marina.

Four photos with a Sigma 150-600 lens on a Canon full frame body.
[Read more…] about Near and Far

Plenty of Times 1

by Leave a Comment

How many times do you use? What time phrases suits you? I’ll be with you in a heartbeat. It’ll be done in three shakes of a lamb’s tail. Only six sleeps to your birthday. The empire lasted five generations.

‘Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.’; an old joke is a new tease for grandchildren. Does time really advance like the arrow or is that an illusion? Isn’t it interesting how spacetime can bend with gravity as does the trajectory of the arrow over distances longer than are common in olympic archery?

Timeless Portland Windhover © Simon Robinson 2019
[Read more…] about Plenty of Times 1

K SerraSara

by Leave a Comment

I like the illusion of free will. That’s not to say that I suffer from the delusion of it. I’m not a solipsist nor am I totally convinced that reality exists. I base that uncertainty on some hallucinations I experienced, the most recent were in a hotel room in Venezuela. My brain overheated with a fever from pneumonia and my perception was that the objects in the room changed shape and perspectives. Or perhaps my brain malfunctioned and failed to re-create the reality I am used to.

  • Bathroom Tableau.
  • Dublin Bus.
  • Demolition Exposure.
  • Grey Reflections.
[Read more…] about K SerraSara

Mycelium Cell-Cell

by Leave a Comment

The Lives of a Cell (1974) is a collection of science journalism essays by Lewis Thomas, a book that had a profound effect on me. One of his essays in particular stayed with me. It was about the mythological beasts that we create, that persist like the unicorns that inhabit our grandaughter’s fabulous world.

Relax with a pot of Double Dragon Pearl Flowering Tea © Simon Robinson
[Read more…] about Mycelium Cell-Cell