Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
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.
I took a photo in August 2012 with a telephone camera whose depth of field and field of view are neither much different to those obtained by whatever device was used by one of my great-grandfathers in July 1888. We’ll call him JLR because it’s easier than John Loftus Robinson. This shot was taken when visiting Hardwick Hall with my father FRR on an excursion following ancestral footsteps documented by a series of photos taken by JLR between 1880 and 1893.
And while we’re abbreviating, so you don’t get confused between JLR, FRR and SLR, I’ll say that SLR is a standard acronym for the single lens reflex camera.
We moved to the US in 1981, the year that Roland Barthes’ final book Camera Lucida was posthumously published in English translation. I had no more knowledge of this book then than I had any notion that my interest in photography would take a back seat for nearly a decade. This is neither whinge nor regret. It was simply that life, family, work and financial imperatives had to prevail.
I had already retired by the time a copy of Camera Lucida found its way to me. Indeed it was, in part, a retirement gift, intended as a torch to light the future rather than illuminating the past. Let me say that forty years after publication, I have found great insight into my own interest in photography through the pages in this book. I have come to see how and why some of the perfections that photographer friends have chased have not mattered quite so much to me.
Today, August 10th was supposed to be the day we walked into Rome. Two of us, hopefully still friends after a very long talk. 2700 km of talk.
The pre-pandemic plan was to walk from Manchester to Rome. Our departure date was going to be April Fools Day. The idea was to walk an average of 25 km, six days per week. We’d have made 114 hikes over 131 days. We still don’t know where we’d have washed, slept or eaten but we’re pretty sure we would have done quite a lot of each.
We went for a walk on the east pier in Dun Laoghaire this morning where it was overcast and spitting rain as sailors got ready for the day’s racing.
The moth is still on our window, clinging on in death.
It seems to me, somehow, that the dust of death is enough for one journal.
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