Monday

I finally bought the new boots and the mention of the charity activity walk in The Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge earned me a 10% discount from 53 Degrees North. Recall that we are doing our walk for Care International and you can sponsor us here. Go on, sponsor us. You know it's time.

I managed a 4.5 km walk today. The new boots and the continuing sore knee made me cautious.

My weight back in 2012

We attended Beyond Caravaggio recently in the National Gallery in Dublin. Dramatic use of light and a new realism (at the time) were techniques inherited by the Caravaggisti on show in this exhibition. I was amazed to learn that there is some debate about the homoerotic subjects and portrayals. No question in my mind. Get over that and instead, explain his violent nature - lead poisoning? syphilis? or maybe he was just nuts? However, he was a great painter and inspired many more.

I picked up Blink by Maclom Gladwell after I stumbled over this photo of my weight in books from 2012 (an idea I re-used here in March). As I was flicking through Blink earlier, I found a bookmark I left in 2012: “Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action." Seems self-evident and yet Little Britain had us all laughing with "computer says no".

This haiku reminds me that I am not the only one surprised by what can be found in books:

I read a book -
somewhere within the book
an insect chirps
Tomiyasu Fusei

Maundy

I set out this morning to test my stamina. I thought I should try to ascend some 500 metres but stay local. Experience tells me can be done in three trips up from sea-level to the dominant landmark, the obelisk. I did four ascents but only two from sea-level, and it took just over four hours. I also had ambitions to walk 30 km but had to stop after some 20 km because my knee began to hurt. My iPhone tells me the 564 m I ascended is the equivalent of climbing 165 flights of stairs. No wonder my knee twinges. Anyway, I engaged in some banter with people at work in the office because one of the team had proposed a stair climbing challenge and I had just done two days worth. In real terms, this is just a start - the Yorkshire Three Peaks are each 500 m.

Orienteers fruit machine with sigma 6 9 and rho perhaps?

Increasingly I feel like I should call my blog walkingcurmudgeon rather than walkingcommentary. When out walking, especially locally, I often get annoyed by the intrusions and in my mind, diminutions of the scenic beauty. There's a race on, not an arms race but a views race fuelled by post-crash rebound cash that seems to be pouring out of the banks again. Trees once used as privacy screens or wind shields are disappearing faster than ever. Homes emerge as if shouting to by-passers "Hey, look at what you don't have" and I don't mean their triple glazing. Planning permissions defy comprehension as new builds are allowed exceed the scale of the landscape by ever increasing margins. Wilfully blind planning authorities? Large plots that were formerly built with discreet homes are long subdivided and now redivided in a dispiriting modern recreation of gavelkind. These shrinking plots are being filled with tall houses that are anything but discreet. We understand that views are not a right but overviews negate indigenous privacies and this appears to be forgotten by our planners. Is demand-driven house price inflation worth the degradation of living conditions as home packing density is allowed increase? Is this a ruse to increase property tax takes by the Exchequer or An tAire Airgeadais? As Naomi Klein put it in The Shock Doctrine: “When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.” 

Sticking with a whinging theme, let me first say how much I enjoy the wild garlic and bluebells appearing all over the area. However, the curmudgeon in me wonders why oriental people think of these as nursery plants and take them home? And I specifically mean people who appear to have oriental origins. I saw the same walkway being stripped of what they called snowdrops both today and last week by different oriental families. Removing them conveys private pleasures to the few, denying public pleasure to the many. It's unfair and mean spirited and just wrong. I wanted to share my exasperation but didn't know how to do it. So who will educate them?

I watched some kids on the beach dipping their toes in the gentle lapping of the water while I was watching terns and gannets hunting and diving. I wondered if the kids and their parents were Christian and understood the symbolism of feet washing on Maundy Thursday. I also wondered about the guys sitting in the nip beyond normal view, taking in the intermittent sun. (Nothing should be inferred by my juxtaposition of these two observations. It's simply what I saw.)

When I got home, I ate four hot cross buns and probably destroyed the value of my workout. I must admit that I enjoyed the buns, washed down with several cups of tea. And I'd have eaten them even if I hadn't walked. So I'm ahead. Well ahead.

By the way, that's an aplite between my boots. It's been there on The Flags for generations and I remember when I first saw it for what it was.  That was after a field trip to study the granite contact and schists down on the beach. Which is where that barred door photo is from, down where the kids put their toes in the water. And the other 'flag' flies over the Dalkey Town Hall.

Gus

Gus has been one of my walking companions for years. I can't fault his enthusiasm but he's messy; his bushy tail tends to ensnare sticks that other dogs might carry in their mouths. And that's on top of the mud and sand and salt water he brings home. And yet, if I walked six kilometres, Gus must have covered ten.

There were enough Sunday morning walkers out in unusually mild conditions that I could eavesdrop on passing snippets of conversation:

"Stone studies? No, no, film studies. Film studies are an Arts degree ..."

"... like mental health funding and assessments ..."

"... and you send them an email by pressing this."

Some of the local rubbish bins attempt inspiration, one stencilled "A day without laughter is a day wasted". 

On White Rock beach, we listened to a clarinet being played in the changing area. We've heard it here before. Gus is not as limber as once he was so we watched people who threw, batted and slingshotted tennis balls for their dogs.

Another 6 km leaves just 480 km to cover in 17 weeks.

Countdown

There is enough for all. The Earth is a generous mother. She will provide, in plentiful abundance, food for all her children, if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace.
William Bourke Cockran as quoted by Winston Churchill in Iron Curtain speech, Fulton, Missouri 1946

It's time for another three peaks walk. This time the Yorkshire Three Peaks on June 27. Unfit and overweight, I have decided to walk 500 km in practice and today is the start of the countdown.

I read the Cockran/Churchill quote in the Irish Times at breakfast. Which gave me a theme for the first walk. I thought I'd start by taking advantage of an increasingly rare privilege and walk past the homes of my male antecedents. I live near where three generations have lived over the last 130 years. The link, in my head at least, is that we should be striving to improve the world for those who follow. Most of my antecedents did that. And knowing where you came from is a privilege that springs from the dedications of those others. This seems implicit in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Walking to raise money for Care International is another method. Helping me raise money does it too. And if we help Care, we help raise people towards self-actualisation. Globally. There is indeed enough for all.


14.5 km today. Just 485.5 km to go.