Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
As of 2016, we’d produced over 320 million tonnes of plastic and there was estimated to be 165 million tonnes of plastic circulating in seas and oceans. Not good considering plastics have only been around since 1950. Imagine how bad it will be if 320 has become 600 million tonnes by 2030. Will the seas then hold as much plastic as we have ever produced today? Will we be locked-out of sterile seas, lakes, rivers and canals?
Intro: I stumbled onto the notes for this post on a back-up disk. I’ve re-worked and expanded them today. The 15 year old grandson is now 19. He just built himself a new rig for gaming. A lesson in delayed gratification, it took months for all of the parts to be delivered in this era of pandemic.
Back in the 1980’s, I was involved in a group charged to implement three-dimensional seismic imaging technology for a service company. My qualification for membership in the team was the prior two years working in another seismic 3D start-up company, where innovation and determination became failure and frustration which manifested as constant corporate re-organisations.
I was sitting alone in a cold, damp bed-and-breakfast type bedroom in November 1995. It was a dreich Scottish night in Aberdeen and I started to read The Beak of the Finch (1995). It remains a stand-out science read and one of the most influential books I’ve enjoyed. The room was cold enough that I felt the need to wrap myself in blankets pulled off the bed, wishing I was like the Tierra del Fuegans who needed no clothes. Darwin was a great diversion when I was undecided; besides being cold, I couldn’t be sure if I was humiliated or amused.
‘The mind is our beak, and the human mind is ever more variable than the brain’ wrote Jonathan Weiner in The Beak of the Finch.
You may already know of the efforts of urban planners to preserve the view of specific places or historic buildings in some cities around the world. These protected views or vistas can have binding legal status for enforcement purposes. You also may be aware that there are thirteen such vistas in London protected by the London View Management Framework.
Views and photographs are today’s story. It starts with sunrise and sunset panoramas taken five hours and thirty-five minutes apart after a four year gap. True north is through the declivity between the two crowns about a quarter of the way in from the right of the lower photograph. My view is restricted on the right by a big cedar and the left is terminated by our window frame. The photographs were not conceived to be perfectly aligned in time or space.
We heard the siren call of the seals this afternoon. Pod, rookery or harem, there were upwards of a dozen of the pinnipeds basking in the diffuse light on rocks exposed by a very low tide.
It was befitting of Bloom’s Day to see the seals in Sandycove where James Joyce spent six nights in 1904. ‘A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round’ was his description of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Could this have been inspired by the Sandycove ancestors of these seals?
