Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
The grim news is that tuberculosis cases are up 25% in the first year of pandemic. This was predicted by people who could see how dangerous the diversion of resources to Covid-19 would be.
It was so obvious that I mentioned the risk of a rise in TB in a May journal last year. ‘The curse of tuberculosis is that it’s thought to be a disease of the poor’ I wrote.
Things repeat if you journal every day for more than a year. This, for example, is my second International Women’s Day. Last year, I wrote of ‘… stories out there about the hordes of women trapped into unrecognised care roles. You know these women. They are your sisters and your daughters for whom these roles are harder to accept than for your wife, mother and grander-mothers.’
I can type because there are proteins that help me do it. The proteins in question enable my muscles to contract and slide over one another among other mundane tasks. They do the same for you and all of our proteins deserve enormous respect. And despite enormous research efforts, we don’t yet know enough about proteins.
I recently mentioned being stopped by the police on Baggot Street in Dublin. It’s happened again.
One of my school teachers used to tell a cautionary tale about a pedestrian who was killed when caught on a road at the bottom of a hill. He’d stepped between the lights of two oncoming bicycles. We were twelve or thirteen years old and not everyone in the class understood the silly joke.
The European Parliament has announced that the 2020 Sakharov Prize is going to the Belarusian opposition Coordination Council, a predominantly female group who are holding out for dignity and democracy. It’s surely a mark of the 26 year reign of the podpolkovnik (supreme commander) Alexander Lukashenko that this is the third time the prize has made its way to the troubled Belarus.
