Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Individuals often spend without thinking but it’s not something you’d want a government to do. What you’d want to see is a reasoned explanation of the proposed expenditures and the sources of the budget to fund them. The evidence should be documented with no less detail than a judicial summary of a trial. The same care and detail should documented for the management of public health.
‘I want a poem
I can grow old in.’ ¹
Poet and Professor Eavan Boland died a year ago yesterday.
Today isn’t our Day 27 on the way to Rome. We’re not making our 24th hike. The discrepancy is that we plan to rest on the seventh day of every week. If we were out on the trail, it would be categorised as an easy 19 km in the Pas-de-Calais. We’d have set out from Wisques after a good breakfast from accommodation unknown. I checked the weather – cloudy but only 9C. Perfect for a hike and another chat. Assuming we’re still talking to one another.
I had an epiphany of sorts in the first year of my career. In fact, I had quite a few revelations as I learned what wasn’t taught in three levels of education. In my first office job, I was being taught practical things by Dalziel, a phonetically correct abbreviation for a very tolerant teacher. I asked how to calculate the length of a geophysical profile and his answer was to ‘count the posts not the gaps’. A few days later, I asked him to explain what ‘mistie’ meant. I pronounced it misty. He laughed and said ‘put a metaphorical hyphen in it’. I was learning about seismic recording techniques from a man who did the Daily Telegraph crossword in twenty or thirty minutes every day while enjoying a pint (or two) of plain and a toasted cheese sandwich (or two) in a Dublin pub. In the realms of onshore geophysics, the listening devices are arrays of geophones, centred on ‘stations’. A billable length, like a fence, is the distance between two stations or posts. Sometimes, for reasons due the geometry of echoes from sloping subsurfaces, two readings might mistie due group azimuth or line bearing.
I’m pleased that the Magnolia chapbook has been well received. I’m saddened that I have found another hundred whose blooms have alerted me to their presence. One gorgeous stellata is barely fifty metres from our driveway, hiding in plain sight from my camera. Our national pandemic travel restrictions have been relaxed and today we ventured beyond 5 kms. Almost giddy with excitement, we walked the gardens of Fernhill, some six kilometres from our driveway. It was lovely to be in the company of tall pines, thuya and wellingtonia, spreading birch, beech and oak. We were also among specimen acid loving trees. Huge rhododendrons, camelias and several magnificent magnolias.
I’m having an epiphany. My moment of revelation actually lasted about ninety minutes. It wasn’t the first time I was traumatised by a television. That happened first in the World at War in the scene where a chicken farmer was splashed by brains. The mood music and laconic narration of Laurence Olivier helped fix this scene forever in my memory. We were shown how the grey matter that had just been thinking terror had sullied the splendid military uniform of a man for whom executions were timed as a newsreel opportunity. Such was Himmler’s power that people slaughtered other people just to appease him. Such was the wilful ignorance in Nazi Germany that this wasn’t considered abnormal behaviour.
