I read yesterday that George Blake has died. I’m old enough to remember his escape from Wormwood Scrubs jail in 1966 but not old enough to recall his trial with much clarity. I walked past the jail in Hammersmith a few years ago and it was Blake’s name that came to mind. Notoriety is strangely long lived.
robert macfarlane
Words
I forgot the word sahel when I was writing From Memory. It’s the word that describes where I was in Niger. Tim Marshal reminded me that it comes from the Arabic word ‘sahil’ meaning coast. Shorelines are another of the things that depend on your perspective; the sea of Saharan sands has a southern coast. Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography is a great read for an armchair cartographer. Follow it along The New Silk Roads from Peter Frankopan to test if your current physical isolation is more or perhaps less constraining than an asymptomatic educational isolation. I’m not intending to be rude or patronising. Knowing you have limitations wakes you to the possibilities that your awareness of your limits is itself limited. Knowing of such limits may encourage you to explore for new concepts, seek the words to conjure and invoke and animate and debate them. Or cause you to distrust your perception.
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26 March 2020 – 19:50 GMT – 7°C Mostly Clear – Co. Dublin, Ireland
I had wanted to acknowledge the great printer #normanackroyd on his birthday but Covid-19 meant no one was around at #eamesfineart to help me understand fair use had I used one of his prints on Instagram. I’d heard the BBC Radio 4 broadcast earlier of an Ackroyd interview by Robert Macfarlane while Ackroyd continued to work. Acid etching and heavy printing presses made for fascinating descriptions even unseen on radio.
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