Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
‘I read the news today, oh boy.’
One million are dead from Covid related illness and we’re going after half a million sharks for their squalene.
‘And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh.’
Death isn’t the end in Romania. A dead man was elected as mayor in a landslide victory. Is it a coincidence that this is the country of Dracula and Frankenstein?
‘… there is as yet no consensus on why religion arose nor on why it has so tenaciously remained. And not for lack of ideas: coopting the naturally selected brain, driving group cohesion, calming existential anxiety, protecting reputations and reproductive opportunities’
― Brian Greene Until The End Of Time.
Does religion persist because it confers an adaptive advantage? Could it be that faith is a byproduct of the evolution of cognition? Could there be better things waiting for us in the future than we are experiencing now? Once you start asking questions like this, potential answers are legion.
Another morning, another pier walk under a clear sky, the shadow lengths already halved while the sun continued to rise towards the upper meridian transit of the solar noon.
The doorbell rang. Standing there, masked, was a highly ranked chess player. He was delivering a plated lemon drizzle cake. Almost surreal except that his very good wife had made it for us as a diversion from worrying about our daughter going through surgery at the time the cake arrived.
The period after the Great War was, for Europe at least, a time of great insecurity. Governments and gangsters both struggled to maintain order.
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.
