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Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

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First Cheese

March 22, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Caveat emptor: today’s musings may suffer from sleep deprivation.

I woke just before first cheese. It was light but overcast, very grey. Dublin Port was handling at least two cargo ships, one leaving, the other arriving. My mind was jumbled. Outgoing stolen cars and animal flesh? Incoming vaccines and fruit pickers? Pigeon toes above the bedroom ceiling scratched me wider awake. I picked up a book but it was too early for the whores who were grabbing fistfuls of jewels in the hallway as they left 738 Keizersgracht. I changed books. It was better to be reading of pancakes whose menu depictions tasted better than the real thing. Probably.

Canon 1D-X | Sigma 150-600 F5-6.3 DG OS HSM | 600 mm | 1/400s | f/7.1 | ISO 1250 | handheld
[Read more…] about First Cheese

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: booklink, brexit, dog, john brockman, mary robison, photo, richard h thaler, tim harford, travel

Chrome

March 21, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

JG Ballard was in the news in 1973 for his novel Crash and I had no idea of the controversy the book created. Many considered it to be utterly pornographic. Then I saw the 1996 Cronenberg movie. After which I read the book. But why did I ever read the book? I suppose it’s because I presumed the movie was more extreme than the book. I was horrified even though I classified the movie as urban science fiction. But it was more Alien than Barbarella. Before seeing the movie, I didn’t know there was a word for a car-crash sex fetish. I was intrigued that symphorophiliacs existed at all. Sometimes reality offers things even more strange than a vampire. And since I lived under the flight path to Heathrow at the time, I briefly wondered if there was a word for plane-crash fetishists.

From a visit to Montjuïc in 2010.
[Read more…] about Chrome

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: architecture, barcelona, booklink, browsers, david cronenberg, jg ballard, mies van der rohe, movies, photo, travel

On Altruism

March 19, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I was much taken as a teenager by Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead. I was at an age of searching for the self I might become by finding what I couldn’t see of myself in the words of others. And Howard Roark came into my life at that nexus. I thought I wanted to be able to say that ‘I recognise no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.’

My recent haul of lockdown gifts … thank you for encouraging me to get walking.
[Read more…] about On Altruism

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: albert camus, ayn rand, booklink, franz kafka, jrr tolkien, photos

Green 495-570 nm

March 17, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Green exists between blue and yellow on the rainbow. It’s odd think that the rainbow might be a few kilometres away but the green is only a colour of the light with a 495–570 nanometre wavelength. It isn’t possible to be sure how far away a rainbow might be because it really only exists in your head. The rainbow is dimensionless, having no weight, size or physical manifestation. Your eye is what receives the rays of light refracted by the millions of droplets of water as they fall from the sky. Transience amplified. But the green is real.

Killiney Obelisk on St Patrick’s Night 2013
[Read more…] about Green 495-570 nm

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: booklink, colour, Dublin Mountains Way, leatrice eiseman, rainbow, walking

Shambles

March 9, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Imagine being a year locked down for a pandemic and two and a half years into retirement. You’d probably get a tad frustrated at being unable to do things you postponed for a decade or two before retiring. Things like exploring new (to me) places and new (to me) arts. Or challenges like going to Rome on foot from Manchester. Of course I’m free to explore new (to me) ideas by way of books and a web of electronic transmissions (without which I couldn’t order the books).

Anachronisms near Westminster.
[Read more…] about Shambles

Filed Under: Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: booklink, dublin international film festival, gregory monro, lewis thomas, photos, stanley kubrick, walking

Ant Rites

March 7, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Shame

I was very disturbed by the recent image of a scion of Irish horse trainers sitting on a dead horse, smiling and finger signalling V for victory. I truly grieved for the horse. I can’t say why this two year old picture ended up in the recent news but it had a huge effect on me. So much so that this is my third journal in a row driven by my reaction to that single photo and the relatively mild sanction imposed by governors within the equine industry.

Scratch and Sniff with a friend last year on the family farm.
These are working pets that rotavate and fertilise the soil.
And there are two because good farmers know that pigs don’t do well alone.
[Read more…] about Ant Rites

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: bbc, booklink, dublin international film festival, horses, john berger, judith butler, movies, rené descartes, tadgh o'sullivan, victor kossakovsky

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