Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Richard Brautigan once misled me back in 1974. I enjoyed Trout Fishing in America so much that I read everything he wrote. At one point, he wrote that he didn’t write. His mental blocks were such that he typed, stopped, scrunched up the paper and threw it into the wastebasket. There, in the basket, the words reassembled themselves into a story he never wrote. I put many words in a bag and despite nearly thirty years of incubation, nothing much has hatched.
Imagine a shaggy dog story set in a desert. Let’s call it a shaggy fenec story because of a desert fox that liked chickens that pecked after scorpions and camel spiders.
‘There was an old lady who swallowed a bird.
How absurd to swallow a bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
that wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.
Perhaps she’ll die.’
The weather is most of the problem at the moment. It’s been a very disappointing few weeks of weather. Persistent rain has provided enough water at a time of maximised sunlight hours to invigorate our hedges well beyond their normal confines.
The photographer in me had four excitements today. None could be enjoyed for their photography but there were other compensations to hand.
Some might argue that the giant tech companies are the Viking hordes of today. Today’s shopfronts might be likened to the walls of monasteries, masking a profound sense of loss after everything of value has been carried off, repurposed to the benefit of others.
Some have warned for decades that the tech giants need to be regulated otherwise they’ll recreate the monopolies like those of the American railways in the nineteenth century. The analogies for today’s supply chains include fibre as rail track and the servers as locomotives. Platform versus content. Utility versus consumable.
I checked my Fitbit today. A watch that spies on me. A gift. I’ve been happy to have it because it counts my steps, monitors my sleep patterns and tracks my average resting heart rate. It even provides the time of day on demand. Which isn’t that often because I have an internal clock that’s reliable to within a few minutes.
I’ve been confidently supplying my bio-data to the Fitbit corporation since December 2018. They used to be known as Healthy Metrics Research Inc which tells you what they set out to do.
Picture us on a zoom call. Something you probably do yourself. We have a weekly Friday evening chat with a friend about what’s not being achieved while the plague keeps us incarcerated so that our health isn’t compromised by our underlying conditions. You know, the underlying implication that our own medical conditions are the cause of any public health failures.
One Friday in particular, I learned that Trumpian delusions may be as infectious as anything that’s out there.
We’d been zooming about the books we’re reading, the news and at the point of swapping recommendations on TV programs we might enjoy watching. I recounted seeing coverage of a dreadfully lax Trump rally that sent all the wrong public health messages.
