Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
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?
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.
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.
‘The world is too small for the kind of localism that leads to wars. We can have special pride in our country, our language, and our literature, our customs and culture and tradition, but it has to be the abstract pride we have in our baseball team or our college – a pride that cannot and must not be backed by force of arms.’
I read a ton of science fiction as a teenager and continued well into my twenties. My father seemed to be reading almost nothing else, though he also introduced me to Neville Shute and lots of WWII memoirs. SF was fully normalised in our home and I took years to understand how rare it was for households to be looking into possible futures. I am so grateful, with hindsight, that ‘what if’ was the mantra rather than ‘once upon a time’.
Yesterday morning, I shaved off my pandemic beard. It was a sunny day with a slight breeze so I took myself to the garden and trimmed it before wet shaving it clean. Not that you care to know such stuff but there it is, I did it.
And yesterday afternoon, I noticed new boreholes in our weeping willow. You know, the kinds of holes you’d assume were woodworm if you found them in your antique table. I sawed off a slice from a branch I’d pruned and paint-poisoned a couple of years ago.
A problem with writing about business travel is that sometimes you can’t name the parties, Rambler maintains. Such trips are maintained to be solely for business. But experiencing new cultures always exposes new things to see and it challenges a rambler to find the new ways needed to see them.
Rambler maintains that these ramblings solely represent the rambler’s biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual people, places and events and does not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of other ramblers. Rambler maintains, to remind and warn you, that these ramblings may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual people, places and events or experiences of this or any other rambler.
