Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
‘What good is a newborn baby?’ asked Benjamin Franklin in 1783 when people questioned his enthusiasm for the recent invention of hot air ballooning. His predictions that the balloons would become significant for transport was unusually wrong. 250 years later, Loon is a balloon system in the news for delivering the internet in Kenya and elsewhere. Balloons are helping transport information.
Is the green apple quicker than the red? Does the green develop faster? Neither are very good questions without a context. That context is a potted apple tree that sits on our back deck. It’s been yielding green apples for over a month. Originally a gift, it’s been there about eight years and this is the most abundant yield to date. It’s an unusual apple tree in that there are two varieties grafted together. Two isn’t so many given the 250 that were in the news back in 2013. But two is enough for us.
I’m imagining a surreal world that I’ll call WedNinSepTwe because that’s the date I started to imagine this weird world. Most Imaginarians would pronounce it wɛdˈnɪsɛpˈtwɛ but the beauty of a conjectural planet is that you can call it anything you like.
A reader asked about a photo in my recent article about a shrew I met while walking in London. The photo was originally posted to WhatsApp, a great tool that I use to broadcast photos and the odd note to attest to my continuing safe progress, remaining both vertical and mentate. Cold Blooded is another photo from the same wet walk.
We lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years, a decade before the devastating Northridge earthquakes rolled out from a huge slip on a hitherto undetected fault.
Our first home was in the foothills of the fault-bounded San Gabriel Mountains. The office was close to the Raymond Fault. Despite such proximity to future earthquake epicentres, we never experienced any severe ground shakes though the potential for them lurked large in our subconscious.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had a truly original thought. That said, this is consecutive journal post number 180. That’s six months of nothing new every day. If journaling was darts …
Caveat emptor: my daily musings may be incomplete and incorrect.
Today’s photo was taken across Dublin Bay through haze this day three years ago. The digital haze clearance and clarity adjustment has introduced an unnatural light effect that is curiously attractive. I had been introduced to the MTO lens the year before and I finally made my way back to the owner with a Canon adaptor. I liked the idea of a 1000mm lens so much that I bought a second hand copy I saw sitting cheaply in Mr CAD Photographic in Pimlico. My MTO-11CA was built in November 1993 from the 1950s design and I’ve already journaled some results from when we lived in London.
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