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Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

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Finite Eternity

May 10, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

We once came across a Bourgeois spider, lurking in the old turbine hall of the then new Tate Modern. Maman fascinated and appalled me in equal measure. My scientific self enjoyed the majesty of the vision that re-created her, triumphantly huge in steel. My male, meritocratic self had visions of limited purposes, sacrifice and cannibalism. And yet Maman spoke to me of the fight for life and a guarantee of a future borne in her egg sac, much as when Yeats wrote of rebellion and nationhood in Easter 1916, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’

[Read more…] about Finite Eternity

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: booklink, bruce nauman, edvard grieg, erik satie, jean-jacques rousseau, louise bourgeois, music, pablo picasso, piccadilly, poetry, rose finn-kelcey, tate britain, Tate Modern, vincent van gogh, warren mailley-smith, wb yeats, william blake

Isolationism

May 6, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

The day started with birds; not a dawn chorus so much as a five-alarm dawn clatter. A herring gull has taken to dawn dancing on the flat roof of our bedroom, for the third annoying day in a row. Our neighbour has seen the bird looking in her windows but here, it sounds like it’s doing a pogo though more likely stripping off the roof felt. I might need to use a selfie stick to video the action just in case gull dancing is trending.

A grandson asked a question about the colour of a woodpecker’s beak. He’s five and the request came by a voice message during breakfast. There are a few Great Spotted or Pied Woodpeckers in the trees around his home and his Dad says they’ve stopped drumming recently so maybe that’s why beaks were on Master 5’s mind.

[Read more…] about Isolationism

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: bird watching, birds, booklink, geology, grandkids, machine learning, photos, spain, travel

Caspian Fishing

May 4, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

We’ll be walking to the Somme this day next year or perhaps the year after, pandemic dependent. The day’s walk will be mostly through lands occupied by Germany in 1916, east of the main battlefields of the Somme. We’ll walk south from Bapaume, passing Combles and finishing in Péronne. I look forward to the opportunity to visit some of the sites not out of macabre interest but to remind me just how fragile peace can be. Assuming things haven’t kicked off again in post-pandemic melt-downs.

Still under curfew, I trawled disk drives yesterday and recovered a lot of ‘missing’ photos. Among them were some memories of a month in the Caspian. Ironically, my first memory was my return journey.

[Read more…] about Caspian Fishing

Filed Under: Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: aktau, albert einstein, baku, book festivals, booklink, chernobyl, dalkey book festival, geophysics, insurance, jostein gaardner, kazakhstan, pj o'rourke, russia, seismic, somme, sturgeon, walking, ww1

Volcanic Adventures

May 2, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Taranaki Spring 2011 © Simon Robinson

What does a photograph depict? What are your expectations? Tag this one with visible elements such as sky, blue, mountain, egmont, ridge, tree, norfolk pine, tower, clock, shops and categorise it by landscape, travel or urban. But if you knew more you might add the contexts of spring, dormant, opportunity or shopping. And if you lived in New Plymouth, you might discard it entirely knowing you had hundreds of better shots. Because if you lived there you’d have the knowledge and time to realise better opportunities.

[Read more…] about Volcanic Adventures

Filed Under: Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: arctic, booklink, gns, new zealand, photography, photos, rugby, taranaki, travel, volcano, walking

Dream

May 1, 2020 by Simon Robinson 3 Comments

I had a couple of vivid dreams last night. Both of the dreams involved impossible workplace situations that sent me back in time to places that never existed. Some weird connections came to me as I awoke, those dream sequences having been extraordinarily real. I’d had enough of swimming in darkened crypts. Say no more.

Gus Always Bright
Gus Always Bright
[Read more…] about Dream

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: 3-sigma, bbc, booklink, ci lewis, clowns, dreams, dyno-nobel, earthquake, explosives, geophysics, julien meunier, jw de courcy, machine learning, mark henwick, monty python, nobel prize, pavillion cinema, popular, robert mallet, sahara, seg, seismic

Future Imperfect

April 25, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

You may have noticed the spine of Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist in a recent photo I posted. There’s a line in it that advises that ‘The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like.’ And with such confirmation I feel encouraged to meld it with an Anne Lamott aphorism that’s infected the web: ‘Every thing that happened to you is yours; people should have behaved better.’

Are these observations deserving of reflection and expression? They certainly contributed to my rereading an older walking commentary blog to see if I’m repeating themes close to my heart and of course, create an opportunity to steal from myself. Which led me down some old paths this morning and a return to a personal favourite theme which is that one’s point of view depends on the view point. Mountain tops become islands if you are looking down from a peak above a cloud filled valley.

[Read more…] about Future Imperfect

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: albert einstein, anne lamott, austin kleon, booklink, brian cox, david moore, georges lemaïtre, jean-jacques rousseau, mark o'connell, mary robinson, Maslow, pankaj mishra, tim flannery, walking

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