Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
It was back in 2003 when first I read that John Pilger had won the Sophie Prize. He was surprised, to judge from the tone of his acceptance speech. His journalism has always been quite outspoken about the imperialist and colonialist agendas of many ‘western’ countries like his native Australia, the UK and of course, the US.
I’ve selected twenty five images from among the many that I took this year. And I’ve chosen one as my favourite. I told its story here on Christmas Day and the picture makes me smile every time I see it. And it’s not even a proper photo, four months after the initial idea, it’s a cropped snap from an iPhone. That’s surely reason enough to make it my favourite from the 305 days of this journal.
The proud parents showed us her sketch and we were taken aback. This was back in early September. Then, a few days later, we were talking about it while hill walking during one of the inter-pandemic lockdown respites. We talked with the artist about her sketch and how art can involve many media. We joined the artist sketching smiley faces on soft slates with hard glacial dropstones and left the faces by the trail to cheer other walkers.
The fabhappy.com website was fully refreshed and relaunched in early November. This was after months of work by Peter who was striving to ‘make it a more pleasing experience for anybody that visits the site.’
I’m not that familiar with Christof Nieman’s work but I occasionally use his website to educate myself. I first saw his work in ‘Abstract’ on Netflix illustrator’s back in 2017 (I date my notes) and I’ve stumbled over his name intermittently ever since.
I think you should enjoy seeing Robert Fisk at work in ‘This Is Not A Movie’. I don’t know where you might see it but like today’s newspapers, it’ll probably be on a digital screen. We watched it on Amazon Prime so I know that’s one source.
