Walking Commentary

Manchester to Rome 2021

simonscarves

Home is Here

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Our home is somewhere in this photo, Home from Howth. I can see the gable wall peering out at me but I won’t share the exact location in such a public forum. I can also see the house where my parents raised my brother and me over some twenty five years. It’s quite something to resolve such detail across eleven kilometres of sea.

You will also see Bulloch Castle at the bottom, about a fifth of the way in from the right (or west). I also think it’s quite something to look back in time to the fortified building style needed by Cistercian Monks during the 12th century in order to protect their fishing rights.

Home from Howth © Simon Robinson 2016.
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Virtual Rome Journal

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Today, August 10th was supposed to be the day we walked into Rome. Two of us, hopefully still friends after a very long talk. 2700 km of talk.

The pre-pandemic plan was to walk from Manchester to Rome. Our departure date was going to be April Fools Day. The idea was to walk an average of 25 km, six days per week. We’d have made 114 hikes over 131 days. We still don’t know where we’d have washed, slept or eaten but we’re pretty sure we would have done quite a lot of each.

This Morning’s Walk in Dún Laoghaire.
A view towards our home neighbourhood, once again cloud shrouded.
The idea of dinner in Rome has a certain appeal today.
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Capital Dot Day

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I made some cryptic notes last November 29th when we were still living in London. I found them again this morning in a notebook subsumed during our relocation.

I had recently read Harry Mathews’ 20 Lines and was thinking about diaries at the time. I had been looking for patterns among my daily experiences that I could or should write about. I was also busy trying to build a commercial outlet for my photography, something I could continue when we moved to Dublin.

Garden: Far and Near at 600 mm © Simon Robinson 2020
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Influences

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0600 Benedict’s Newsletter: No. 335 arrived yesterday and I scanned it on my phone. 15% of global internet traffic is Youtube and 11% is Netflix – more than a quarter of the traffic. Then I read his essay Covid and cascading collapses. You should too. Ever seen a soufflé collapse when the oven door opens? Technology collapses don’t happen the way you think or remember. And that makes them hard to predict. But what does seem useful is to know is Lenin’s astute observation that you can get a decade of inevitable in a week.

  • Fence Texture.
A scarf design candidate that might be produced one day by simonscarves at FabHappy
© Simon Robinson 2014
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Mourne Sunset

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Mourne May Sunset © Simon Robinson 2020

Yesterday, the mystery was the wind. Today, it may well be teaspoons.

That AA Milne poem came back to me as I photographed a landscape of the Mourne Mountains in the light of last night’s setting sun. I knew I wouldn’t get a sharp image of anything because the air was moving as thermals, returning the day-borrowed heat into the atmosphere. Locally becalmed in our isolation, yes, but the Mournes are 100 km distant. All of that radiating heat becomes a cooling and distorting visible haze over that distance of an evening.

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