Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
‘The dolphins may save us’ said the farmer, the wind farmer, the former wind farmer with whom I shared a bizarre sighting of three mallard. We sometimes walk the same park path, shuffling past one another, maintaining an exaggerated social spacing as befits the age.
It’s been time to paint the inside of the house. Linear measures, height by breadth give the area and from that you need to estimate the volume of paint. The realities of inexperience regarding surface absorption rates kicks in. One litre covered four square metres of a garden shed last year. One litre of varnish did two coats of a bench. One litre of undercoat will cover fifteen square metres inside the house.
I know there are people out there who think that calling something a ‘first world’ problem is elitist. The real ethical dilemmas are often the reverse of the correction. Does a quota system that manages for inequality discriminate against those that formerly had the upper hand? Does labelling for first or third reinforce the stereotypes? Probably but what other language do we have?
