Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The Wild Atlantic Way
There had been a plan to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2020. It was thwarted by SARS-CoV-2 restrictions in 2020 and again in 2021. I considered walking one of the world’s longest defined coastal routes instead. The Wild Atlantic Way traces the rugged, indented western coast of Ireland, some 2600 km, the same distance as those pilgrim trails the pandemic put beyond reach.
MOMENTS
Reading Caspar Henderson’s 21st Century Bestiary, reminded me that the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub defined the ‘dimension of the present moment’ as a little less than three seconds.
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.
The Burren arrived by post this morning. A beautiful graphical representation of a timeless place scoured, smoothed and littered by passing glaciers. Driving out to the Black Head Lighthouse for a late summer sunset has more than once rewarded me with memories as permanent as the photos I could have taken. Following the road to the south, the bare escarpment to the left might be rendered pink by the dying light. Grey limestone enlivened by photons and water droplets can shimmer rose-pink-rose-pink-rose-pink. Light that left the sun some eight minutes earlier persists in the mind decades later.
‘Lovely map – sadly its maker met Covid-19’ wrote my benefactor on a card that accompanied this most generous gift. ‘Hear you are planning an Atlantic Walk’.
[Read more…] about Generosity and Coincidence19 Mar 2020 – noon GMT – 7°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Dublin, Ireland
We are exercising to stay fit. Outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, conveniently called a fathom in English. An anatomical unit of measure like cubit nor passus. Not really six feet either but once measures were standardised, it became six feet, then the unit of depth via weighted plumb-line measurements and now, I’ve got to the bottom of it. The largest of the anatomically inspired units. From a time when social isolations were the norm. Today we might call it 1.8288 metres but that requires a standard for the metre that we can’t carry with us. A metre today is the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299 792 458 when expressed in the unit m⋅s−1, where the second is defined in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs. Imagine meeting a German who knew the ‘faden’ to be 1.7 metres or a Swede who used the ‘gamn’ for 1.784 metres or buying a length of silk from a Dutch trader selling in ‘vadem’ units equivalent to 1.818 metres. Reminds me of the international response to the Covid pandemic. Each nation cutting its cloth to its own measure despite globalised funding for a World Health Organisation. We know the metre was proposed by the French who defined it as one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris. Not every country uses SI units and of those that do, some spell it differently. Thank you to China and South Korea for leading the way on Covid transmission mitigation and suppression. Sorry that global cooperation remains immature.
[Read more…] about Fathom