Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
I boarded the plane in Charles DeGaulle Airport, destined to stop over in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast, en route to Niger. Happily, Lia had come to Paris with me for a few days while I collected a work visa from the Niger Embassy.
We had coffee and cereal while wanting to watch TV news coverage that isn’t streaming. Our TV service comes streamed via a broadband modem and a set-top box. It’s a frustrating example of technology that’s provided without adequate integration and training of the provider’s workforce. It’s taken a month for an admission that this is a service issue rather than something we’ve done. It’s a very asymmetric relationship between provider and customer. The accounts department will know if a subscriber fails to stream cash on time. The technicians are divided into factional departments who don’t seem to know when the streaming TV service is failing let alone how to fix it.
We read the Irish Times newspaper at the dining table. The so-called Last Supper in Clifden was the dominant news story. Members of a golfing society met and dined in a hotel in celebration of their society’s 50th anniversary. Unfortunately, there were over eighty for dinner at a time when the limit was six. It’s a measure of the confusion of changing pandemic rules that the gathering was attended by people involved in advising, framing and enforcing the rules. It’s becoming a national scandal. A minister and a senator have already resigned and others in key national and international leadership roles are catching a lot of media flack. Perhaps the biggest lesson is not about flaunting pandemic advice or alleged arrogance but national governance. It seems that the society membership includes members of the cabinet, the parliament and the judiciary. This suggests, to the lay observer, that the executive, legislative and judicial functions might not be quite as independent as should be expected in a democratic parliamentary republic.
There was a time when those travelling to Dublin or Belfast were treated equally badly in Heathrow or in any British ‘mainland’ departure point. All travellers were downgraded to being a threat. Everyone going to the island was treated with equal suspicion. Much the same happened in the US after 9/11. The terrorists know that the threat of terror always costs society more than the terror itself. Threat is the real terror. Threat leverages a cognitive bias. Humans are very poorly equipped to deal with perceived fears.
Burglar: a story involving sleep where we used to sleep.
Methane: an article about a hidden threat.
DNA: a disease mitigation hint from genetics.
Each of these links that came via my email in the last 24 hours. I thank my suppliers for the food for thought and absolve them from blame for my derivative musings.
Continuing from last time, you’ll recall that we were in a desert dealing with a health and safety policy that mandated a full test of an emergency response plan within four weeks of setting up operations. We were in week four and about to create a cautionary tale of ill-considered independent action that rivals Hilaire Belloc’s lion-eaten Jim.
‘And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse’
You can’t read I Will Never See The World Again without being affected by it. I challenge you to read what Ahmet Altan has written especially if you worry that you have become desensitised by the descending spirals of ever worsening news. Perhaps you are inured, worrying that you have a heart of stone. He writes with such elegance and equanimity that I am certain your heart will flutter several times.
Even those of us who are empathy-challenged will be troubled by many aspects of this book.
