Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
I had to go to the dentist recently because a damaged molar needed attention. A week later, I returned to have no more than a few proud microns of enamel polished down in order that my jaw would close properly.
Jaws are truly remarkable things. Ask a jawless lamprey sucking on mud soup if they suffer jaw envy. Ask an oral cancer patient if they’d thought much about their jaws before calamity struck?
I was up around 3 am, my sleep disturbed by the winds of Storm Francis. In a quiescent period, I saw some of the Pegasus constellation behind the scudding clouds. The myths of the winged horse came to mind when I saw a virtual box described by four stars in the southwest sky. For no reason I can think of, I recalled that Pegasus carried Bellerophon into battle against the fire-breathing Chimera.
Jetting from London to Houston, with noise cancelling headphones isolating me from both a snoring neighbour and the rumble of our propulsion, I imagined a Bantu throwing a spear at a stork. I also wondered what it was like in 1822 when no one could imagine a White Stork making an annual round trip after breeding in Germany, going south of the equator in East Africa to avoid European winters. At that stage in our understanding, the ancient Greek idea that birds turned into fish for the winter was still popular.
