Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
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.’
One Saturday afternoon in Dallas, Texas my heavily first-baby-pregnant wife came into the office to help me rescue some time so we could have a weekend. While I punched cards (yes, it was that long ago), I asked Lia to help interpret some velocity scans. She set about the task after a brief introduction to the technique of selecting time and velocity pairs from patterns in the scans. Her background with x-ray imaging gave her an unusual edge. She was looking at the data as she picked out the patterns within it. She noticed an anomaly and we discussed that this was probably what we termed a bright spot, maybe even a direct hydrocarbon indicator that I thought of as Lia’s anomaly.
We were sitting eating our lunch earlier today when there was a percussive thud from the the French door at the end of the table. A recently fledged Robin hadn’t seen the glass. No immediate or obvious harm, the little bird turned and flew back into the undergrowth. Sheepishly, it seemed to me. Perhaps such a stunning might temporarily cause an avian to adopt mammalian ungulate behaviour.
Texas was almost my first thought because of the memory of a Painted Bunting that crashed into the window of my office long ago in Sugar Land. Almost the same sound today resurrected a long parked memory.
The Midori Sours with beer chasers appeared to go down well. Rounded up to £20 with a healthy tip, the barman was encouraged to keep a close eye on the celebrity drinking. His attentiveness barely interrupted his telling of how he lost his last hotel job by crashing and writing off a brand new sports car.
‘I mean written off’ he said ‘not even ten miles on the clock’.
Funny how even the size of a word on a bottle of shampoo can float memories back to the surface. ‘Hair Shampoo with Argan Oil’ was written on a bottle on the shelf in front of me while I shaved. Glasses off, ‘Argan’ is unclear yet unambiguous. My subliminal messaging retrieval kicks in and I’m back in a restaurant pouring an Argan oil dressing on my salad. I was there with five other colleagues. It had been a long day towards the end of a complicated three month geophysical project. We had been recording two dimensional profiles in a hunt for commercial hydrocarbons.
Intro: I stumbled onto the notes for this post on a back-up disk. I’ve re-worked and expanded them today. The 15 year old grandson is now 19. He just built himself a new rig for gaming. A lesson in delayed gratification, it took months for all of the parts to be delivered in this era of pandemic.
Back in the 1980’s, I was involved in a group charged to implement three-dimensional seismic imaging technology for a service company. My qualification for membership in the team was the prior two years working in another seismic 3D start-up company, where innovation and determination became failure and frustration which manifested as constant corporate re-organisations.
