Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
Some say February 1st is the first day of Spring north of the equator. We woke to TV coverage of scenes in Burma where it’s Groundhog Day the day before Groundhog Day. The military have taken control yet again.
‘Write and tell us when we are going wrong’ said Aung Sang Suu Kyi at the end of her interview with Fergal Keane in 1995.
I wouldn’t know this but for walking along Offa’s Dyke for a few days in 2019. My walking buddy and I found ourselves in a bookshop in Hay-on-the-Wye where I picked up a used copy of Fergal Keane’s Letter to Daniel, published in 1996 for his new-born son. While I’ve enjoyed dipping into these stories over the last fifteen months, I realise that Daniel must be around 24 now and I wonder what he thinks of his Dad’s letters. And I wonder if Keane ever wrote to tell Daw Suu how they were going wrong.
We found a curio earlier. A keyring fob that’s been hiding in a suitcase since 1992. I know how long we’ve had it because it comes from my time in Burma, from the Yangon Sailing Club at 132 Inya Road. It was a great place to socialise just a short distance from the university and uncomfortably close to the nearby site of a student slaughter in 1988.
Please join me in a story of ghosts. If you come with me, you will start by travelling back 30 years to a computer room in a leafy tropical suburb near where two Burmese leaders Aung San Suu Kyi and General Ne Win lived in their different confinements. She was at home on Inya Lake, held there because of an internationally decried house arrest. He was also in his lakeside home, confined allegedly because of ill health but really because his puppets were slowly side-lining him before they erased him from history.
