Walking Commentary

Manchester to Rome 2022

poetry

Kenning

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We went to see The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover in The Landmark Theatre in Greenway Plaza in Houston. That was in 1989 and the Greenway Plaza was then the home of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. The cinema was more arthouse than mainstream which explains how we saw a Greenaway movie in a Greenway cinema in a place then better known for basketball. Romantic crime drama with cannibalism – just the thing for a brief respite from parenting when we parked our kids with the 5Es for a few hours (a great family with five kids whose names started with E).

The tower, the bathers, the isle and the freighter.
Yesterday, James Joyce’s Martello Tower, the Forty Foot bathers, the Muglins and passing freighter.
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From Westminster Bridge

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People say that Wordsworth wrote in praise of the early morning in London, saying that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’. That was in 1802, half a century before before the The Great Stink changed the way London used the River Thames for waste management.

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 8, 2018
Annual Great River Race, from Millwall to Richmond.
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Uncertainties, Alright Jack?

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This Robin bathes most days in our plant pot saucers.
The Road Not Taken
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
ROBERT FROST
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Storied Morphing

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It seems that the easiest way to add twists to your tale is to have other people retell it. This was my learning from what Manchán Magan has written up of an ongoing experiment by artist Alannah Robins in the Irish Times Magazine today.

Near, Far and Further with the benefit of the 150-600 mm lens.
Speckled Wood Butterfly, Buzzard and Sugar Loaf People
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Finite Eternity

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We once came across a Bourgeois spider, lurking in the old turbine hall of the then new Tate Modern. Maman fascinated and appalled me in equal measure. My scientific self enjoyed the majesty of the vision that re-created her, triumphantly huge in steel. My male, meritocratic self had visions of limited purposes, sacrifice and cannibalism. And yet Maman spoke to me of the fight for life and a guarantee of a future borne in her egg sac, much as when Yeats wrote of rebellion and nationhood in Easter 1916, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’

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