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Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

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Tax Collectors II

August 21, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I have already been told that my first post on Tax Collectors was pretty dark. This second story will not be much brighter despite being desert based.

Tax collectors have often been brutal down the ages. Just ask the residents of Isfahan why they killed Tamerlane’s tax collectors in the late 1300s. Unfortunately for them, as when the city of Khiva upset the great Timur in 1370, he then slaughtered Isfahan’s citizens and razed the city. Arguably, his most infamous atrocity was that he commanded a pyramid be built from the skulls of the tax renegades. He treated Damascus and Baghdad with similar contempt. Yet he transformed his city of Samarkand to a place of wonder that persists today.

Tamerlane / Timur is a folk hero these days. He’s on the money in Uzbekistan and I’ve seen him on a horse in central Tashkent. Not bad for someone whose no-nonsense ruling style was accentuated by the slaughter of as many as ten million people across the Timurid Empire that once stretched from Ankara to Delhi and Hormuz nearly to Moscow.

[Read more…] about Tax Collectors II

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: desert, geophysics, history, lake chad, photo, sahara, timur, travel, tuareg, uzbekistan

Shaggy Fenec: Episode 1

July 17, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Imagine a shaggy dog story set in a desert. Let’s call it a shaggy fenec story because of a desert fox that liked chickens that pecked after scorpions and camel spiders.

‘There was an old lady who swallowed a bird.
How absurd to swallow a bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
that wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.
Perhaps she’ll die.’

Spiders, scorpions and vipers v hens, turkeys and fenec.
[Read more…] about Shaggy Fenec: Episode 1

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: birds, desert, emergency response, geophysics, photos, sahara, travel

Deadly Acacia

May 20, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

There is an acacia tree in the front garden across the road from the Woodbastwick Road Junction in London’s SE26. I’ve seen it in full bloom in early March while I was walking London’s Capital Ring. Between Sydenham and Penge, it is adorned with bright yellow balls that appear light as feathers and grouped together into a conical habit. A tree that dresses to impress. A tree that’s worth seeing.

The day I saw it, it reminded me of the acacia in our back garden. An equally impressive tree that is generally purple. It sometimes shows greenish or yellowish or grey or brown. But as I said, it’s generally purple. We’ve recently shaped it into a topiarists ball. Once it was a wonderful place for two cats to hang out but they’ve moved on and now it’s great song perch for garden birds.

Moving Office 1996
[Read more…] about Deadly Acacia

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: desert, geophysics, niger, photos, sahara

From Memory

April 16, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Our eldest grandson once dropped a lightning strike in our kitchen. It broke as it hit the table top. Shattered in fact. I’d brought the lightning strike home in a bottle some twenty years before. A plastic bottle, stuffed with toilet paper to protect the delicate lightning strike. An age-old message in a new-age bottle. An untold story found on the shores of a lake dying in an incoming tide of sand. Our ten year-old grandson was very uneasy after the accident, looking in horror at the shards of lightning that lay on the table. It was a lightning strike that had been recorded in sand, its heat creating a vitreous memory with a dendritic shape that mapped the path of the electrical discharge. A very elegant and tactile artefact, a fossilised lightning strike known as a fulgurite. I found this one at the base of very small dune somewhere north of Lake Chad. I’d seen what appeared to be broken twigs lying on the surface. I was curious since I’d not seen any plants for hours and KB stopped the Land Cruiser for a closer look. I’d never seen fulgurites before but I knew of them so maybe this was a lightning strike and worth keeping. Whether recent or older than the ancient trade routes that criss-crossed this desert, who could say. And so I picked it up and it made its way into a just-emptied water bottle after being wrapped in some of the emergency toilet paper we kept in the 4×4. And thence, eventually, it came to Ireland. And for the sake of our grandson, I’m pleased to say that I brought home more than one. And he was relieved to know that too.

[Read more…] about From Memory

Filed Under: Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: chad, desert, fulgurite, grandkids, lightning, niger, photos, plane crash, uta

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