42

She arrived early in March, the plane landing at Katunayake airport before dawn.

I woke after the spring forward loss of one hour to the church bells ringing. I counted 123456789 all the way up to 42 bells, a marathon distance - a sign. I looked out and saw the magpie tree - nine birds at nearly nine o'clock - another sign. Downstairs, I enjoyed toasted sourdough bread with peanut butter, an orange and strong coffee while looking out on perfect weather. Too many signs to resist.

I imagined three goals (Ireland 2 Macedonia 1 perhaps):  get to sea level thrice, see several of the more interesting local houses for sale and walk at least 16 km. Let's go.

Up to the Killiney obelisk, cold in the haze. Across to Dalkey quarry - lots of climbers - some mountain rescue practice - down The Metals - women walking dogs and babies. I passed another magpie tree with five casing the area. On to Hillside where a brace of goldfinches perched in the bare branched budding shrubs - and down to Newtownsmith and several Sandycove kayaks, scuba divers, swimmers, more joggers and cyclists - to Joyce's Tower and the Forty Foot. Some religious fervour in a front garden (a photo I put onto yesterday's post). Across to Bulloch Harbour, empty, the boats being anti-fouled on the hard stand. Up to Dalkey, past several flavours of Christian church, filling and filled for Sunday services. Back up to Telegraph Hill via what we called Millionaire's Row in the 1970s. And down by the Cat's Ladder, on down Vico Road via Nerano to Coliemore were more divers had come ashore. And then back up to the obelisk by Vico where the sunny morning had enticed joggers, strollers, coffee walkers and even some kung fu fighters in practice that looked like dancers in among the pine tree. A drink listening to Norwegian cyclists, a snack quickly taken because of the chill on sweaty clothes and warming fast back down to Killiney Beach where after a quick inspection of the sea, I turned and trudged back up the alleys to the top of Roches Hill from where it was a very easy walk home. About 17 1/2 km on three ascents (500 vertical m) chosen to test my stamina, which is not great but surely improving.

So many thoughts and memories - the multicoloured heather - the elegant and well-dressed young woman in black with the two cute puppies - the Weimaraner that wanted to "play" with the Scottie by picking it up - the views into Jaguared front gardens exposed for now by the plant cull after the deep freeze of our last winter - the not yet fully disgraced banker walking en famille - the chalk inscriptions that led to Bono's house - the cherry blossom - yet more cherry blossom - the feeling that this is a beautiful place to be, underlined by returning to Sky News still reporting various forms of unrest in Libya and Japan with which anarchist riots in London and Portuguese insolvency cannot compete.

It was Hilary Mantel who opened Booker winning Wolf Hall with "So now get up". 

Pablum

A grey bird glided in and out of Harry's field of vision.

Welcome to today's pablum. It'll be a short description of a seven kilometre walk to the butcher for a chicken. I felt a bit odd carrying this chicken around on my back for so long, remembering Douglas Adams description of a trip to visit Komodo Dragons in his book, Last Chance to See.

"Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially."

I understand that white lions, in Lion Park near Cape Town are fed chickens too.

Other than walking, looking and talking (all very rewarding), I was thinking about mandative subjunctives and the post positive intensive adjective - a form of insanity perhaps. Anyway, I had insisted that we take this this big-ass walk to get the chicken and I was determined to understand its grammar, of the sentence that is. So the mandative subjuncive is me insisting we take whereas the intensive (post positive, of course) is the ass.

So how are we doing with first lines? Did you catch the boy called Santiago in The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho?

Fairies

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Another opening line, this easy to identify if you have heard about let alone read the book. So which of the previous incipits was from Georges Simenon's 1932 classic, The Bar on the Seine?

Today's walk started in Marlay Park in Dublin and took in the first 8 km of the Wicklow Way up to the microwave towers at Three Rock Mountain and on to Fairy Hill. A linear walk, we covered about 15 km in ideal, beautiful conditions accompanied from time to time by other walkers, BMXers and pony trekkers. While in the park, we passed the Fairy Tree in both directions, lots of notes pinned to it by kids. From notes of gratitude for helping them recover from illness, to notes of pleading for parental reconciliation, the tree was also decorated in Mardi Gras style with beads and ribbons. When we returned, there were two gardeners adding lichen and other mystical plants to the tree. I joked that I had thought it all real and the guy the holding the ladder told me they were real fairies.


You can see the walk in Google Maps here or you can track them in Facebook where Walking Commentary posts the feed from the iPhone app Walkmeter. Imagine, the phone battery died on the way back today; the iPhone reputation for battery life is well deserved. The walk appears truncated but we did make it back.

The fund raising is going really well. We have wildly exceed the required £3000, passing £8300 on the way to our new goal of £10,000 (and then "on to infinity and beyond"?). We are hugely pleased by everyone's generosity since Care and other charities are not getting the bullish support they once did; these recessionary times have made charity more difficult. Our baking, car washing and other office-centric activities have been really well supported. Now it's time to try other sponsorship avenues, meaning you (dear reader, assuming you exist).

Proxigee

Clare: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.

I repeated, roughly, the hill and beach walks of the last few weekends, with the emphasis on flights of steps. I covered about 9 km alone (with about 200 m of vertical steps) and then another 3 km with my companion from yesterday. I started of in early sunrise haze and finished in mid-morning full sun, at about 15C; the first time I felt Spring had arrived

Insecure Vandals 

Which was interesting to me because I was watching a few people swim at White Rock and I wondered if they knew the sea was probably the coldest it ever gets, the water temperature in the Irish Sea lagging the air by about three months. The guy in the wet suit with the boogie board seemed unconcerned but another guy in ambitious Bahama shorts went blue after about four minutes, fled from the sea and stood shivering hard in his towel.

I also wondered if the swimmers realised they were swimming in an extreme Proxigean Spring  Tide, the tide rising about almost a meter higher than normal because of the coincidence of the full moon syzygy and a lunar perigee. I hardly saw the full moon last night, hidden as it was behind the clouds that delivered the rain to Landsowne Road that helped complete the rout of the English rugby team, providing our new stadium with its first great memory. The tidal thing won't concern and may even mystify those who live in Kansas, Kazakhstan or Kenadsa and think the sea is a waste of space. The tide was so high that I had to climb over the jutting rocks that separate Killiney and White Rock Beaches, where the granite is in direct contact with the country rock, now schists.

Contact

Today's dog walkers on the beach filed past, ever polite. A nod of recognition or even words of sympathy (rarely apology) when the snarling or barking dog harasses you, as two did today. Perhaps the Latin words like equinox, perigee or the vandalised beach buildings were suggestive but I kept thinking of the walkers as Romans (not quite troops), walking in their straight lines and armed with (tennis ball) slings or launchers that looked like short swords drawn and ready for action. The allusion fails when I note most had earbuds in place to avoid actually hearing natural sounds of breaking waves and birds.


So which opening line was from Pompeii by Robert Harris?

Climb

View: Sugar Loaf to Killiney

A radiant late afternoon.

My companion (9 and 363/365ths) had this to say about climbing the Sugar Loaf: we parked the car in the car park and we we could see the mountain and the tiny figures already on top. We started to walk to the shoulder. We had to climb because it was so steep. It was very rocky. We saw a raven. And larks ascending, singing all the way until they went invisible, though they kept singing after we couldn't see them anymore. And a fierce mountain dog - he was shrunk to handbag size by starvation; he was looking for inattentive children to eat so he could become a big dog again. And three motorbikes racing and we could smell their oil. And so many people walking that it was like a shopping trip because the parents were carrying their kids. Then we went home to play with Lego Minotaurs. You can make your own dice. 

Oystercatchers

On the morning of January 6, two hours before dawn, a man named Robert Clinch rolled out of bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

I felt like a bit like that opening line this morning before my coffee. It was a beautiful day in Dublin and I went for two walks. The first was about four km and it was a typical early morning in south County Dublin in that it was clear, the time before the cloud blows in. It was also cold, perhaps zero centigrade, the pavement littered with delicate pink, frost-knocked blossoms. Snowdon was clearly visible across the Irish Sea from Killiney Hill, a reminder of Ireland's unearned rugby defeat in Cardiff yesterday. Gus, mindlessly enthusiastic, ran out in front of a car, signalling an overdue return to the leash and home, ending the first walk.

The second walk was about 11 kilometres, roughly the same as the last one on Friday, with lots of steps. I took to collecting photos of postboxes (in progress) and listening in passing to snatches of other walkers' conversations, coincidentally all involved money - the two fast walking 40s something women: 'we'll have to sell the house in Oporto' - the stressed 50's something parents: 'he can't eat our food if he has enough money for wine' - the nervous 20s something son and unflappable father figure: 'really, that should be enough to see it through' - and the 30s something mother to hers, hidden in a pile of coats on the beach: 'you don't have to give them all lobster sandwiches!' as their toddler toddled oblivious in the sand and I wondered if the sense of 'all' was crowd or purity.

Then I got a Facebook post from New York post about food poisoning. It beeped on arrival to my iPhone as I was looking at a group of about ten  oystercatchers walking in front of me (causing ironic linking thoughts about poison and oysters). It took the birds quite some time to decide I was too close. So I photo'd the birds with the phone as they took off, edited the picture as best I could in mid-morning glare on my phone and then uploaded it, hoping to bring cheer to the miserable. All while walking. 

It's time to start acknowledging the writers of the first lines, perhaps making this first revelation easy. Which opening line was from A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka?

Beach

They left the aqueduct two hours before dawn, climbing by moonlight into the hills overlooking the port - six men in single file, the engineer leading.

This opening line marks the start of the 13th of these walks. No links to anything, just another book I read recently.

Today's walk can be seen in Google Maps, here if you want. Most of my walks are discoverable in the same place. It was drizzling most of the way, cold enough for gloves for the first hour and thereafter, wet, particularly so once I fell in the sea. After climbing across the granite/schist contact that separates White Rock and Killiney strands, I was walking in the shoals of wave washed glacial till that cover Killiney Beach. I chose the walk to have lots of different surfaces to help train my legs; steep steps, grass, heavy pebble beach and some climbing over huge boulders. Anyway, I needed to catch my breath and decided to take a picture at the water's edge. The undertow sucked the pebbles from under my feet. I had the iPhone in photo mode. Over and in I went, the phone too. I grabbed the phone as a small wave broke over us and it still worked. My rain gear kept most of the water out though my pockets and shoes did fill up. It felt strange after spending an hour watching TV coverage of today's tsunami in Japan.

I walked as far as the Shanganagh River, turning back at the mariners marker I now call Aaronisbent after the griffito in today's photo. I covered 10 km in about 150 minutes and it was tiring because I have not been walking enough. There's barely two months before the Scottish Three Peaks so I need to redouble my training and my quest for sponsorship, now at 63% of our initial £3000 goal, which we had hoped to beat by raising closer to £10,000.

Forge

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

Forge in mock HDR

The sun rose for the 20,447th time and as ever, I missed it. I took a lift to Aughrim in Wicklow and went for a ten kilometre walk. The red-doored town forge enhanced the granite grey, under a grey-skied drizzle in the thin fog of cloud that keeps the Ow and Derry rivers watered. The tree- felled river banks, the logs haphazardly scattered among the water logged wheel furrows, resembled a  narrow margin of abused countryside. The smell of burning wood lingered in the windless valley, the chimney smoke thickening the grey air.

It was cold and I walked up through a Coilte plantation, into the cloud at 150 m and the world disappeared.