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Volcanic Adventures

May 2, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

What does a photograph depict? What are your expectations? Tag this one with visible elements such as sky, blue, mountain, egmont, ridge, tree, norfolk pine, tower, clock, shops and categorise it by landscape, travel or urban. But if you knew more you might add the contexts of spring, dormant, opportunity or shopping. And if you lived in New Plymouth, you might discard it entirely knowing you had hundreds of better shots. Because if you lived there you’d have the knowledge and time to realise better opportunities.

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Words

April 30, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I forgot the word sahel when I was writing From Memory. It’s the word that describes where I was in Niger. Tim Marshal reminded me that it comes from the Arabic word ‘sahil’ meaning coast. Shorelines are another of the things that depend on your perspective; the sea of Saharan sands has a southern coast. Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography is a great read for an armchair cartographer. Follow it along The New Silk Roads from Peter Frankopan to test if your current physical isolation is more or perhaps less constraining than an asymptomatic educational isolation. I’m not intending to be rude or patronising. Knowing you have limitations wakes you to the possibilities that your awareness of your limits is itself limited. Knowing of such limits may encourage you to explore for new concepts, seek the words to conjure and invoke and animate and debate them. Or cause you to distrust your perception.

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Non-obviousness

April 29, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I sat down to write about non-obviousness as a thought experiment. I’d cleared my desk of a litter of barely legible notes, making room for a Gedankenexperiment and a second cup of strong coffee. These notes were written in bed in the dark between 4 and 5 this morning. That’s a trick I learned from Lia though it’s taken me twenty years to put it into practice.

Then my phone almost saved me from myself. I was contacted, though not tasked, to see if there were any giraffes in my study. A safari of this kind required I reload an enormous back-catalogue of photos into Lightroom which left me with time and coffee-energy to write up a non-obvious journal entry.

Giraffes found in my study from Masai Mara in Kenya and Fota Wildlife Park in Cork.
The lower Irish giraffe is a scarf idea for simonscarves at FabHappy
All photographs © Simon Robinson

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Creativity

April 28, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I’ve travelled rather more widely during this curfew than you might expect. It matters not that I only leave the house to walk the dog, replenish the cupboards or sometimes ferry our daughter to her hospital treatments. Even those journeys are more than most may be able to do.

My Fitbit encourages me with milestone reminders that are a disinformation of virtual comparisons. I’ve never walked the length of India or chased Monarch butterflies in migration. I suppose I have ascended to the clouds, not so often on foot as in planes. But I can’t ever wear the ruby slippers earned this time last year on a 50 km hike across the Dublin Mountains Way. That’s a walk memorialised by real effort, actual pain, wonderful exhilaration, some boredom, wind driven chill, magnificent views and the stupidity of postponed toilet breaks. And yet, here I am, writing about ‘badges’ and showing my version of them as a virtual walker’s map depicted in iPhone photo ‘badges’.

‘Badges’ map The Dublin Mountains Way in April 2019
All photographs © Simon Robinson

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OC and Disorder

April 27, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven.’

This wasn’t originally an opening line. The idea for opening with it is from a 2011 fund-raising blog. I started every entry with the first line of a recently read novel. This was easy’ish’ because a novel a week was a great distraction from the inflections of geoscience projects and travel-induced jet lags. It was was a quiz-inspired fund-raising hook and I’d reveal the answer in a subsequent post. Interested readers might come back to learn, for example, that it was Hilary Mantel who opened Booker-winning Wolf Hall with ‘So now get up’. I had hoped, more importantly, that some might also contribute to a group fund-raising effort before a charity walk. They did contribute and most generously but not because of the quotations.

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Chicken Shoes

April 24, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

France decided yesterday to stop export of medicine made in France to the European fraternité. I suppose once liberté had to be temporarily suspended, we were already on the slippery slope to the restoration of firsts among the egalité. Unfortunately Robespierre wasn’t inclined to add securité to protect from terror. And today, what was until recently only a renascent nationalism is finding its legs. I hope European solidarité notices before the Hungarian contagion supplants Covid-19.

I have heard many say the curfew is helping us become more self-sufficient. Here’s a dinner we cooked for ourselves the other night. Romano peppers stuffed with lentils, accompanied with rice and greens. The peppers recipe came from Mildreds. Oh, how we miss Mildreds! It’s not quite the same having their two cookery books but they help.

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