Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
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.
‘No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision.’
– Barbara W Tuchman in The Guns of August (1962)
I want to be considered a rationalist but I find it very hard to defeat the hormones that often provoke me to irrational responses. I don’t want to be accused of being an alarmist but there really are some cataclysmic things we should worry about.
