• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Manchester to Rome 2022

  • ManRom22
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

the atlantic

I Told You

November 27, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite’ is Spike Milligan’s epitaph. ‘I told you I was ill’ are the enduring words that recall his death in 2002, except they are as Gaeilge.

Some ornamental things that caught my eye this day 2016.

‘A Úachtaráin agus a chairde’ said Queen Elizabeth II in Dublin, at a State Dinner in her honour in Dublin Castle in 2011. It was hosted by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese and that’s why the visiting monarch opened saying ‘President and friends’.

Martina Devlin has a story in today’s Independent that is quite surreal. It’s about an Irish language epitaph on a headstone that has been blocked in the UK. ‘In ár gcroíthe go deo’ which means ‘In our hearts forever’, would seem to be at risk of persisting ‘in our courts forever’.

The head of the Anglican Church spoke in Irish without translation and yet, her ecclesiastical courts have consistently ruled that Margaret Keane’s epitaph in Irish must be translated to avoid misinterpretation.

If I was a UK citizen in Northern Ireland, I would see this as an insult. I would treat this as an affront, a direct insult to me, to liberalism and to freedom of expression. I’m not a UK citizen and I’m pretty worked up about it because there is a history of mistrust. Like a natural resource of enmity and bile, this Anglican Church appears to mine a seam of bitterness and bring confrontations to the surface. One could say it suggests that the society the Anglican prelates represent are sliding back towards medieval if not authoritarian thinking.

It’s a disgrace that the Church of England should deny Irish speakers of British citizenship the right to express themselves in their own language. It’s antediluvian and harks back to the worst of Victorian memories when the poorest of British subjects in Ireland were allowed starve to death else forced to emigrate. It’s hard to prove causation or understand the 1840s imperial thinking but some argue that it was helpful to reduce the numbers of subsistence farmers, that it was a necessary step towards clearing the lands so that agricultural practices could be modernised. Some have said that Stalin learned from this program in creating the Holodomor of the 1930s.

A chairde, words matter and their language matters too.

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: anglican church, epitaph, gaeilge, irish independent, josep stalin, margaret keane, martina devlin, photos, queen elizabeth, spike milligan, the atlantic

Overlooked Variables

October 4, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

The story of K. This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic is an excellent informative read. Go to The Atlantic and read what Zeynep Tufekci had to say on September 30. And perhaps read her many other articles since the pandemic hit.

The spiders remind us of hidden dangers at our rarely used front door.
[Read more…] about Overlooked Variables

Filed Under: Anchoritism Tagged With: johns hopkins, league of nations, pandemic, photos, the atlantic, zeynep tüfekçi

Persistent Ambiguity Persists

July 8, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Opening Ambiguity

Some might argue that the giant tech companies are the Viking hordes of today. Today’s shopfronts might be likened to the walls of monasteries, masking a profound sense of loss after everything of value has been carried off, repurposed to the benefit of others.

Some have warned for decades that the tech giants need to be regulated otherwise they’ll recreate the monopolies like those of the American railways in the nineteenth century. The analogies for today’s supply chains include fibre as rail track and the servers as locomotives. Platform versus content. Utility versus consumable.

Bathrooms in Opposition.
[Read more…] about Persistent Ambiguity Persists

Filed Under: Anchoritism Tagged With: blm, booklink, colonialism, colum mccann, game of thrones, inequality, ingrid burrington, monopoly, pandemic, photos, the atlantic, thomas packenham, timbuktu, walls

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe


Recent Comments

  • Lia Mills on Gallery: 25 2020 moments
  • Simon Robinson on Yachts, Leaks and Bacteria
  • Felicity McCartan on Yachts, Leaks and Bacteria
  • Felicity Mc on Celebrate Minor Mundanity
  • Liz on Yachts, Leaks and Bacteria

Categories

  • Anchoritism
  • Fake Memoir
  • ManRom2021
  • Uncategorized

Tags

ahmet altan albert einstein astronomy bbc birds bird watching booklink brian greene burma cancer colum mccann computing Covid-19 dog dun laoghaire fabhappy fitbit flowers food gardening geology geophysics hans rosling inequality irish times leinster rugby lia mills london movies nobel prize pandemic PEN international photo photography photos poetry popular rugby sahara simonscarves the guardian travel ungrievable volcano walking

Recent Posts

  • Collective Responsibility
  • Travel Excuses
  • Inya and Offa
  • Where Is The Edge?
  • Charting Phrenology

Archives

  • January 2021 (21)
  • December 2020 (31)
  • November 2020 (30)
  • October 2020 (31)
  • September 2020 (30)
  • August 2020 (31)
  • July 2020 (31)
  • June 2020 (30)
  • May 2020 (31)
  • April 2020 (30)
  • March 2020 (31)

Footer

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom22
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Subscribe


Copyright © 2021 · Revolution Pro on Genesis Framework