Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
I was much taken as a teenager by Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead. I was at an age of searching for the self I might become by finding what I couldn’t see of myself in the words of others. And Howard Roark came into my life at that nexus. I thought I wanted to be able to say that ‘I recognise no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.’
‘When British mathematician Clive Humby said ‘Data is the new oil‘ back in 2006, he meant that data, like oil, must be refined and transformed to make it into useful products and services.’
Tim O’Reilly quoted this to open his recent article Data Is the New Sand for The Information. He concluded that data isn’t oil, it’s more like sand.
And that got me thinking, as I suspect O’Reilly wanted: his very first line was that ‘The metaphors we use are like a map. They can guide us or lead us astray.’
The Dissident is a movie that you should see. We watched it in the Virgin Media DIFF (Dublin International Film Festival) which was streamed to our living room. You may be able to catch it online from Prime from April 1st.
The Southern Magnolia aka Magnolia grandiflora and I’ve located one so far. Oh, but you don’t know what I mean even though you guessed from the title that this is journal #377.
March, being the month of magnolias, will be marked this year by my challenging myself to make a chapbook of magnolia photos. Magnolia will be the next photozine from Bracket Books Ireland.
‘It was drizzling most of the way, cold enough for gloves for the first hour and thereafter, wet, particularly so once I fell in the sea. After climbing across the granite/schist contact that separates White Rock and Killiney strands, I was walking in the shoals of wave washed glacial till that cover Killiney Beach. I chose the walk to have lots of different surfaces to help train my legs; steep steps, grass, heavy pebble beach and some climbing over huge boulders. Anyway, I needed to catch my breath and decided to take a picture at the water’s edge. The undertow sucked the pebbles from under my feet. I had the iPhone in photo mode. Over and in I went, the phone too. I grabbed the phone as a small wave broke over us and it still worked. My rain gear kept most of the water out though my pockets and shoes did fill up. It felt strange after spending an hour watching TV coverage of today’s tsunami in Japan.’
I could tell you a story or two to explain why I’ve not been posting journals for a few weeks. Instead, I’ll tell you that I’ve been occupied on my next chapbook project. I’ve been consumed by what I needed to learn in order to make it worth doing.
