Walking Commentary

Manchester to Rome 2021

dun laoghaire

Coastal Fishing

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Pity the fish.

Hemingway was long presumed to have exhausted his creativity when he produced a novella out of the blue, so to speak. The Old Man and the Sea was first published in just one edition of Life magazine which sold 5,300,000 copies in two days. And that’s today’s story, a tale of five million likes in just a few 1951 days and zillions more since. Not bad for a book the literary critics say is among Hemingway’s least significant works. Perhaps that became easier to say after he had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature on account of books like The Old Man and the Sea.

While on the subject of pity and fishing, here are seven photos of fishing activities and the like around the coast here in South County Dublin.

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New Normal Diary Wedding

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0700

We had coffee and cereal while wanting to watch TV news coverage that isn’t streaming. Our TV service comes streamed via a broadband modem and a set-top box. It’s a frustrating example of technology that’s provided without adequate integration and training of the provider’s workforce. It’s taken a month for an admission that this is a service issue rather than something we’ve done. It’s a very asymmetric relationship between provider and customer. The accounts department will know if a subscriber fails to stream cash on time. The technicians are divided into factional departments who don’t seem to know when the streaming TV service is failing let alone how to fix it.

0800

We read the Irish Times newspaper at the dining table. The so-called Last Supper in Clifden was the dominant news story. Members of a golfing society met and dined in a hotel in celebration of their society’s 50th anniversary. Unfortunately, there were over eighty for dinner at a time when the limit was six. It’s a measure of the confusion of changing pandemic rules that the gathering was attended by people involved in advising, framing and enforcing the rules. It’s becoming a national scandal. A minister and a senator have already resigned and others in key national and international leadership roles are catching a lot of media flack. Perhaps the biggest lesson is not about flaunting pandemic advice or alleged arrogance but national governance. It seems that the society membership includes members of the cabinet, the parliament and the judiciary. This suggests, to the lay observer, that the executive, legislative and judicial functions might not be quite as independent as should be expected in a democratic parliamentary republic.

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Imagined Futures

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This time next year, a week short of entering Rome on foot, I hope to be resting for a day in Viterbo, between Lakes Bolsena and Bracciano. Each of these lakes occupies the caldera of a dormant volcano and I will enjoy the sight of them.

‘So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true, that doesn’t mean it is true.’ (from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman).

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A Week In Three Photos

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The summer weather has not been kind here in Dublin. In a mock despair, we ended up doing a jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table while it lashed rain. The puzzle took several days and it made an interesting photographic challenge once completed. How do you make a jigsaw interesting but different to the picture on the box? There are hundreds of ways but I wanted to do it with a tilt-shift adaptor on a 50 mm manual lens. I really like this photo with a focal emphasis on two tourists in front of an iconic London bus. It was raining there too.

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Thursday

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We walked Dún Laoghaire pier before 9 and were rewarded by the diving of gannets and terns into the slack tide.

The mean tidal range in the harbour is about 3 m while the difference between the lowest and highest astronomical tides is recorded as 4.7 metres. An amazing feat of engineering, this was in 1842 the largest man-made harbour in western Europe.

Then I moved a few kilometres south to watch people fishing from Dillons Park. Constant change is the reality of living by the sea.

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