Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
I stumbled over a few cartes-de-visite recently without realising what they were. I hadn’t realised that Parisians and Victorians (and the rest of the world) exchanged photographic portraits as calling cards.
I took a photo in August 2012 with a telephone camera whose depth of field and field of view are neither much different to those obtained by whatever device was used by one of my great-grandfathers in July 1888. We’ll call him JLR because it’s easier than John Loftus Robinson. This shot was taken when visiting Hardwick Hall with my father FRR on an excursion following ancestral footsteps documented by a series of photos taken by JLR between 1880 and 1893.
And while we’re abbreviating, so you don’t get confused between JLR, FRR and SLR, I’ll say that SLR is a standard acronym for the single lens reflex camera.
Yesterday, I wrote about what I was doing in November 2010. That retelling was inspired by a receipt that fell from a book. The revisit to 2010 had me looking at some photo albums and there I found a memory of great pain.
By coincidence, this weekend ten years ago we had a couple of our extended American family as guests for lunch. It was Sunday lunch and I decided to go back with them on the train to Howth where they were staying and then walk home. Which is exactly what I did and I got home on the Monday very early AM which was like today, May 31st. It’s a 42 kilometre marathon distance walk and you can read about the blisters here.
