Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The bikes spent their last night relaxing in the van. We found parking for a month, the bikes popped out and the van was left in Canterbury. We set off maybe thirty minutes behind schedule. No shortage of Kent hills, we followed cycle route 16 to only to reach Dover just after the ferry check-in closed. We crossed to Calais by the hybrid ferry Pioneer, so quiet the electronic toys of other passengers became intrusive.
[Read more…] about Rome Day One: 13 Sep 2023Evidence of absence can be hard to find. Since our minds are endlessly inquisitive and infinitely creative, belief doesn’t have to mean an absence of doubt. Agree or disagree, David Farrier suggests our signatures will remain when we will be absent. Maybe those fossilised traces will be concreted radioactive waste among middens of chicken bones wrapped in plastic but what about narrative, myth and metaphor?
I created this chapbook after my van’s side mirror was clipped and broken by a passing truck. I cursed its crossing into my lane on the narrow suburban road. Then I exchanged shards of mirror-glass tidied up from the tarmac. Perhaps I should have exchanged insurance particulars. My thinking was that the delivery truck company would have recorded the incident, establishing their driver’s culpability beyond doubt.
I planned to document a bicycle trip from Cheshire to Kent with images of street art. I imagined this afterword would be drawn from street artists’ words and ideas. Yes, I’d expected that murals and graffiti would be ubiquitous. But no, there was less urban scrawl than I’d expected, especially rare in the heritage parklands of the Peak District. Instead, it was the elusive Chiffchaff that inspired us.
Forgive me cyclists for I have raged.
It’s been sixty minutes since my last encounters when I denied cyclists twice.
The incidents occurred while driving home along coastal along roads that I have used for fifty years. The constrictions, curves and cambers of these roads have been learned as I walked, jogged, cycled. I have driven cars and motorbikes around these once medieval tracks with their ever changing aspects and glorious views.
