Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
There’s a small collection I like to keep beside the bed, things to dip into when the news of the world depresses me. One of the items is My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir (2014); a depressing yet brave collection. These are stories about a soldier from a family of soldiering trying to hold onto his humanity. Brian Turner has written a lot about his PTSD without really addressing it directly. I’m very pleased that we have his signature on the copy beside me.
This night four years ago found us in a very special place, a retreat more accustomed to housing guests of the nation than folk like us. We took full advantage and went for a crepuscular walk once we were locked into the estate. We had the freedom of an entire domain until dawn.
Jame Joyce thought that ‘Thought is the thought of thought’ or so he wrote in Ulysses which he started in 1914, at the beginning of The Great War, when people forgot to think and petty jealousies among Imperial cousins killed millions.
Rabindranath Tagore, while on a US tour in 1916, wrote that ‘You who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetish of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.’
I have three episodes from Bolivia to share. Let this be the first.
Theman had an acute sense of the absurd such as we’d all get if only we could keep our eyes open.
I was lucky enough to work with Theman in two countries. He was technically proficient, an expert in his field and professionally, utterly dependable. He was a devil for the details, an incisive and dogged detective. Which are great attributes for a surveyor. And besides, he was great company to travel with.
We first met in the Andes, up on the altiplano in Bolivia and a few years later we had a second encounter in the deserts of Niger. We were three months in the one, six months, on and off, in the other. There was a lot of time to exchange old blusters and experience new absurdities.
[Read more…] about Bolivia IBrown and green are shades rather than hues. You know this because you don’t see them in rainbows. Look, here’s a selection of some of my rainbows to remind you.
Yesterday, I wrote about what I was doing in November 2010. That retelling was inspired by a receipt that fell from a book. The revisit to 2010 had me looking at some photo albums and there I found a memory of great pain.
By coincidence, this weekend ten years ago we had a couple of our extended American family as guests for lunch. It was Sunday lunch and I decided to go back with them on the train to Howth where they were staying and then walk home. Which is exactly what I did and I got home on the Monday very early AM which was like today, May 31st. It’s a 42 kilometre marathon distance walk and you can read about the blisters here.
