Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Omne Bonum (Every Good Thing) is an incomplete encyclopaedia created by James le Palmer (died ~1375) which survives as four volumes in the British Library. Can we say that every thing is good in our knowledge 650 years on?
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.
