Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
I admitted here recently that I had aspired to kayak around Ireland. A week later, Michael Viney had an article in the Irish Times that caused me to acquire a story of an actual journey around Ireland by Kayak. The secret sauce.
We’ve just been for a walk down the east pier in Dun Laoghaire, something you probably realise we do very regularly these days. From the pier, we had been watching a sunlit ship emblazoned with Corsica Ferries and Sardinia Ferries leave Dublin port. Then, to our surprise, the ship turned somewhere beyond Howth and returned to port.
I just found a note, sent by young man who could not have known it would be a much older man who read it. Like a message in a bottle, it was just a scrap in a box that has floated around the world, following me since I wrote it in 1987.
I walked from Westminster to Primrose Hill on this date in 2019. I walked past Regents Park Zoo, drug dealers and The Beatles’ Apple Studios. I didn’t see any tourists searching for Freud, apart from me. Over by Abbey Road, the street was alive with people taking selfies on one of the most famous pedestrian crossings in the world.
If you visited with us over a weekend while we lived in London, it’s likely that you joined us for breakfast in Colbert. It’s a restaurant that we often visited for breakfast but never went at any other meal times.
Many say that the Irish coastline is about 3,200 km long. Others believe it to be perhaps 6,347 km. Or maybe it’s closer to 16,000 km. Distance perception was on my mind as I was photographing the Muglins and Kish Lighthouses yesterday because The Kish lighthouse always seems relatively near on a clear day.
