Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Who knows what ‘normal’ activities will be after this time of pandemic has passed? Who knows how to chart the path to an unknowable future from an uncertain present and a disputed past? Who knows how to prioritise public health and economic performance?
We lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years, a decade before the devastating Northridge earthquakes rolled out from a huge slip on a hitherto undetected fault.
Our first home was in the foothills of the fault-bounded San Gabriel Mountains. The office was close to the Raymond Fault. Despite such proximity to future earthquake epicentres, we never experienced any severe ground shakes though the potential for them lurked large in our subconscious.
‘Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?’ sang Freddie Mercury back when Queen dominated the music charts.
Imagine the medics explaining to you that a patient’s pulse is dangerously low but no one can diagnose the cause. The next day the patient is much revived and you are pleased he was hospitalised. What do you do on the third day when his pulse drops dramatically for no explicable reason?
There’s a medical history that you don’t yet know. So you make the call, the only call you think should be made. His health is your priority. So you arrange for a medical evacuation to a country with better medical facilities.
He’s a colleague and you are both a long way from home. In this instance it matters that you are his boss. Despite the training and protocols, responsibility and accountability for your office co-workers were just concepts before a crisis. Suddenly your egalitarian approach to office and project management needs a hierarchy to function to preserve a life.
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.
I was up around 3 am, my sleep disturbed by the winds of Storm Francis. In a quiescent period, I saw some of the Pegasus constellation behind the scudding clouds. The myths of the winged horse came to mind when I saw a virtual box described by four stars in the southwest sky. For no reason I can think of, I recalled that Pegasus carried Bellerophon into battle against the fire-breathing Chimera.
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.
