Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
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.
Each night, for the last week, the heady fragrance of trillium has wafted up to the bedroom. Up some five metres comes the perfume from the eight flowerheads. I’m not a chemist but I do wonder about the concentration levels of the compounds that transmit olfactory pleasure over such a distance. I think these things walking in the park when socially distant hair shampoo and personal perfumes waft over me. The fear of covid should have changed us all.
You probably have enough oxygen to realise that conscious thought becomes increasingly difficult as the level of oxygen decreases. You’ve probably always known that brain death happens very rapidly. You may even know that decay starts within 5 minutes of an interruption to the supply of oxygen. In short, you might not know it as hypoxia. Yes, brain hypoxia can cause severe brain damage or death surprisingly quickly.
I have lots of reason to like this picture. Chief among them is that it’s of an echium that lived in our front garden for the usual 18 months. It came from the first seed that germinated, sprouted, grew and thrived from a batch of seeds that was given to us by a very keen gardener and friend who died earlier this year.
I went out into the garden this morning with a scissors. I clipped some leaves off a winter cherry, an acer, a butterfly bush, a willow and a wisteria. It’s autumn and the chlorophyll has been breaking down for weeks. The greens have been shifting to the shorter spectral wavelengths of yellow, orange and red as their hosts conserve energy for the winter. And it’s this process of energy conservation that creates the splendid autumn scenes that rival the flowering of spring. I blotted and pressed the leaves dry and flat before making arrangements on the scanner bed.
