Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
There may be a photo out there somewhere of me sitting by a deer, holding the rifle I used to shoot it dead. That’s because I was brought up as a hunter and such a photo would have been a trophy. In truth, my family started my hunting early.
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.
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).
So, this is journal number 150 and I’m wondering if Siena is a nice place to visit. We’d have spent last night there and be walking down the last eleven days to Rome if not for the pandemic. Our plan had us continuing along the Via Francigena, reaching Ponte d’Arbia tonight where we’d planned to rest for our weekly day off. I think we’d have stayed a second night in Siena instead. I’ll try to remember this for next year, assuming waves of pandemic and panic won’t prevent us trekking from Manchester to Rome in 2021.
There’s a letter regarding life insurance on the counter this morning. It includes a Covid alert that seems strangely inappropriate on a renewal notice.
