Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
I was walking around the west end of London this time last year. Freely walking around, no mask, no gloves. It was few weeks before we’d depart for Ireland and I took a few photographs simply to amuse myself. Little could I have imagined how walking around, taking photographs wouldn’t be considered an essential task for much longer.
People say that Wordsworth wrote in praise of the early morning in London, saying that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’. That was in 1802, half a century before before the The Great Stink changed the way London used the River Thames for waste management.
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.
Every town and city has traffic problems. Most of them arise from evolution. That is to say, the function of the towns has changed with time. Dalkey in South County Dublin is no different.
The infrastructure that is the nexus of any town has a tendency to be outgrown. That’s not to say redundant. Imagine, for example, the horse puckey problems you’d have to live with if the internal combustion engines (ICE) hadn’t rescued us from foul odours, flies and the squelch underfoot. And if you can’t imagine it, consider that history records there were four or five horses for every human when the ICE began to replace equine power. That’s a lot of manure.
‘Days and months are itinerants on an eternal journey; the years that pass by are also travellers’. – Matuso Bashō (1644-94)
I noted this quotation a few years ago; a dozen in fact. Reading it last night triggered thoughts that spawned a few more. I wish you good luck on this eternal journey.
It’s amazing to me that so many people on different continents came to live in caves carved from volcanic tuff. The Puebloans or Anasazi in New Mexico, Etruscans in Italy, and the Cappadocians in Turkey spring to mind. Each realised, independently, that tuff was relatively easy to carve into negative moulds for habitation. Conversely, the Rapa Nui on Easter Islander chose to cut positive shapes from similar material.Presumably their moai have religious purpose. While time may travel, coeval independent solutions seem to occur quite frequently.
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’.
