Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality
– from Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen
The post office counter person headed to a local shop for milk and cake while I was addressing three envelopes sold to me to save 40% on postage. I appreciated the recommendation but it cost me 20 minutes extra parking because that’s how long it took.
We four went to a local park earlier today for a three-generational distance-separated walk. It was a balmy July day, neither warm nor cold but it was dry. It’s a place I know well as the start of the long distance trail called the Wicklow Way. The Wicklow Way is a self-guided walk from Rathfarnham in Dublin to Clonegal in Carlow some 27 kilometres long. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve walked south from this spot and indeed, I can’t recall the number of times I’ve ended my treks here. Perhaps the sum of starts and finishes is 24.
It’s a place Mom and the two kids know well because of the fields, the playground and the great recreational opportunities the huge open spaces provide. Trees, lakes and rivers are a bonus for these young explorers who were moving rocks to dam a stream within minutes of arrival.
Most nights, Mum will read to her six year old at bedtime. Perhaps a story, perhaps a poem about things that are hard to explain:
‘No one can tell me,The day started with birds; not a dawn chorus so much as a five-alarm dawn clatter. A herring gull has taken to dawn dancing on the flat roof of our bedroom, for the third annoying day in a row. Our neighbour has seen the bird looking in her windows but here, it sounds like it’s doing a pogo though more likely stripping off the roof felt. I might need to use a selfie stick to video the action just in case gull dancing is trending.
A grandson asked a question about the colour of a woodpecker’s beak. He’s five and the request came by a voice message during breakfast. There are a few Great Spotted or Pied Woodpeckers in the trees around his home and his Dad says they’ve stopped drumming recently so maybe that’s why beaks were on Master 5’s mind.
[Read more…] about IsolationismFrance decided yesterday to stop export of medicine made in France to the European fraternité. I suppose once liberté had to be temporarily suspended, we were already on the slippery slope to the restoration of firsts among the egalité. Unfortunately Robespierre wasn’t inclined to add securité to protect from terror. And today, what was until recently only a renascent nationalism is finding its legs. I hope European solidarité notices before the Hungarian contagion supplants Covid-19.
I have heard many say the curfew is helping us become more self-sufficient. Here’s a dinner we cooked for ourselves the other night. Romano peppers stuffed with lentils, accompanied with rice and greens. The peppers recipe came from Mildreds. Oh, how we miss Mildreds! It’s not quite the same having their two cookery books but they help.
Our eldest grandson once dropped a lightning strike in our kitchen. It broke as it hit the table top. Shattered in fact. I’d brought the lightning strike home in a bottle some twenty years before. A plastic bottle, stuffed with toilet paper to protect the delicate lightning strike. An age-old message in a new-age bottle. An untold story found on the shores of a lake dying in an incoming tide of sand. Our ten year-old grandson was very uneasy after the accident, looking in horror at the shards of lightning that lay on the table. It was a lightning strike that had been recorded in sand, its heat creating a vitreous memory with a dendritic shape that mapped the path of the electrical discharge. A very elegant and tactile artefact, a fossilised lightning strike known as a fulgurite. I found this one at the base of very small dune somewhere north of Lake Chad. I’d seen what appeared to be broken twigs lying on the surface. I was curious since I’d not seen any plants for hours and KB stopped the Land Cruiser for a closer look. I’d never seen fulgurites before but I knew of them so maybe this was a lightning strike and worth keeping. Whether recent or older than the ancient trade routes that criss-crossed this desert, who could say. And so I picked it up and it made its way into a just-emptied water bottle after being wrapped in some of the emergency toilet paper we kept in the 4×4. And thence, eventually, it came to Ireland. And for the sake of our grandson, I’m pleased to say that I brought home more than one. And he was relieved to know that too.
[Read more…] about From Memory