Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
I had a bad few days recently. But first, since I’m not qualified to have opinions on why my days were so bad, here are a few weasel words.
Caveat emptor: my musings may not be complete let alone correct.
The full story starts with a fear of failure. It starts with the worry that my attempts to manage my cholesterol with diet were failing. It ended with a realisation that I wasn’t able to finish any of my daily journals.
Our media are showing restaurants and bars, cinemas and sports. There is an emphasis on we are missing. On the face of it, the global media appear to be pandering to and reinforcing our anxieties.
Once upon a time, there was a truth to be seen while walking along The Ridgeway among hills in Wiltshire. Night wasn’t falling at all. It was rising. The darkness filled the valleys from the floor up. Another time, after walking 35 km from the White Horse at Uffington, I was collected by my friend who lived locally and told me that everyone knew mobile phones don’t work reliably along the ley lines. Had I only known of the ancient ley lines when I got to Avebury?
What is yellow? The autumn leaves of the Ginkgo biloba on our back deck are yellow. After a lineage of more than two hundred million years, we may have first encountered it as an occasional leaf appearing imprinted on the coal we burned in our fireplaces. You may know that botanists classify plants into five groups. You may not know that in one of those groups, there is just one curiously different, lonely surviving species, Ginkgo biloba. It seems a bit unfair that the lone-member ginkgo ended up in two small pots in my homes, one the coal scuttle of my youth, the other a planter currently in our suburban garden.
Sometimes you travel a long way to see more than rain. Best bring an umbrella because the destination should be better than the journey.
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.
