Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

texas

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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Banquet Gānbēi

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I’m on the mailing list for the The London Review of Books and every now and then their Diverted Traffic anti-news newsletter catches me with an appetite for a morsel from their archives.

While I enjoy these essays, reviews and stories, I savour the memories that they invoke. I’m living a lot of my life in my head at the moment and remembering unusual experiences gives me food for thought and a recipe for journaling.

  • Saturn V, NASA Clear Lake, 1985
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On Birds, Ghosts, Velocity and Serendipity (2)

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One Saturday afternoon in Dallas, Texas my heavily first-baby-pregnant wife came into the office to help me rescue some time so we could have a weekend. While I punched cards (yes, it was that long ago), I asked Lia to help interpret some velocity scans. She set about the task after a brief introduction to the technique of selecting time and velocity pairs from patterns in the scans. Her background with x-ray imaging gave her an unusual edge. She was looking at the data as she picked out the patterns within it. She noticed an anomaly and we discussed that this was probably what we termed a bright spot, maybe even a direct hydrocarbon indicator that I thought of as Lia’s anomaly.

1981 Geophysical Computer Room
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On Birds, Ghosts, Velocity and Serendipity (1)

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We were sitting eating our lunch earlier today when there was a percussive thud from the the French door at the end of the table. A recently fledged Robin hadn’t seen the glass. No immediate or obvious harm, the little bird turned and flew back into the undergrowth. Sheepishly, it seemed to me. Perhaps such a stunning might temporarily cause an avian to adopt mammalian ungulate behaviour.

Texas was almost my first thought because of the memory of a Painted Bunting that crashed into the window of my office long ago in Sugar Land. Almost the same sound today resurrected a long parked memory.

Twitchers in Galveston 1988
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Alamo

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Once upon a time I felt like a surrealist sitting in front of The Alamo. The grackles were coming to roost in the live oaks, squawking and whistling and chirping. The crepuscular light also brought hordes of bats who appeared from the west and I wondered why no one worried about a rain of droppings.

I missed the photo of a lifetime. A woman walked past in a full black hijab over an iridescent blue burka. She crossed the street in front of an illuminated Cinderella-themed wedding carriage drawn by two white horses driven by a mock lonesome cowboy.

A Twighlight Blurry Storm Coming Cinderella Lonesome Cowboy snap on my phone
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