Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
I was much taken as a teenager by Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead. I was at an age of searching for the self I might become by finding what I couldn’t see of myself in the words of others. And Howard Roark came into my life at that nexus. I thought I wanted to be able to say that ‘I recognise no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.’
It seems I was wrong about how sunflowers transport their water to the tip of the plant. I have just read that science doesn’t really know how a tree transports water from the soil to the crowns of trees. Ask yourself the simple question I forgot to ask: how does the world famous redwood called Hyperion get water to its crown 115 m above the ground? It must be properly hydrated given that it’s over 900 years old.
