Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Frank Mitchell was the Professor of Quaternary Studies when I was a geology student in Trinity College, Dublin. When he retired in 1979, I was already overseas, working in Sharjah. A few job changes and a dozen years later, I was back in Ireland so to speak. In fact, I was commuting to work overseas and never found employment in Ireland in the coming thirty years.
If you visited with us over a weekend while we lived in London, it’s likely that you joined us for breakfast in Colbert. It’s a restaurant that we often visited for breakfast but never went at any other meal times.
You might collect stones that caught your eye. I do and have brought many pebbles home to our garden. My favourite is from Milford Sound, favoured for its exotic nature and the likelihood that I’ll never visit New Zealand again. The 200 million year old pebble I took from Milford was likely first shaped by passing glaciers 20,000 years ago. Then again, more local beach pebbles can be interesting too. Can you imagine what they’ve experienced in 100 million year lifetimes?
Yeasts as carbon dioxide strippers. What a concept! Suddenly you are thinking of National Collection of Yeast Cultures in Norwich or the Center for Bread Flavour outside Brussels? Wrong countries. I’m thinking of Austria. But first, we’ll need to go to the UAE, Oman and Cyprus where you might be able to see rocks soaking up CO2.
Every time I open my laptop, I see a price list of Cecil Beaton’s photographs. A bare printed list of 76 pictures that I saw in an exhibition of his photographs in April, 2017. The folded paper prevents the keyboard imprinting itself on the screen.
We lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years, a decade before the devastating Northridge earthquakes rolled out from a huge slip on a hitherto undetected fault.
Our first home was in the foothills of the fault-bounded San Gabriel Mountains. The office was close to the Raymond Fault. Despite such proximity to future earthquake epicentres, we never experienced any severe ground shakes though the potential for them lurked large in our subconscious.
