Walking

I walk or cycle almost every day across five or six villages per walk, and more on bikes. During these walks and bike rides I see that there is a chronic lack of safe walking and cycling routes, if you want to go for any distance. Almost every village has five, six or more roads in and out of it, but there are no safe walking or cycling routes

We hear about how people want to make cities more cycle friendly but there is a problem in the countryside. If you want to walk from most villages to most other villages you need to walk along roads where nothing is in place for walkers. You are forced to walk into muddy fields, long wet grass and more.

We are in a pandemic and I like to walk away from people. To do so I need to walk along muddy paths by the sides of roads, motorways and fields. In the process my shoes get covered in mud and I need to find ways of removing that mud.

The challenge isn’t with dry mud, because that’s easy. Run down some stairs and the mud that was on your shoes will be on the stairs, and the shoes will be clean. The drawback is that neighbours and cleaners hate this, apparently. Enough to complain about it but not enough to put something to clean shoes by the entrance to the building. We’re not in 1901, we’re in 2022. Who still walks in muddy fields today?

Today I went for my daily walk and I saw a shape. I thought, “That looks like a fox” and as I approached i had a doubt about it being a dog and I felt fear but I continued forward anyway. Eventually the fox noticed me, looked at me and then fled the other way. This is good news. This means that the fox was healthy, rather than rabied. It also means that I can keep being relaxed about seeing foxes.

The weather was finally dynamic today. The storm warnings were flashing towards Hermance, on the French side of the lake. This gave a nice contrast between the yellow of the Colza fields and the dark threatening clouds behind.

At moments I thought that rain would begin to fall but luckily the doppler radar, and my instincs were correct, so I did not get drenched in rain or pelted with hail. At one point it did feel as though hail could be a possibility.

Roman remains may be found and excavated but sometimes nature reclaims them. These ruins were discovered in 1882 but nature returned and hid them safely away again. Such tweets should inspire archeological departments, and film and TV or BA Media Studies to document the process of re-excavating these ruins, with photogrammetry and other modern tech used.

https://twitter.com/MSFMagic/status/1493179373431803904

When I started writing about the Roman civilisation in the summer of 1996 content was still new on the web. Wikipedia didn’t exist and we still relied on books and encyclopedias. We still had to visit ruins and more. Today the web has matured to such an extent that you can find tweets about the Roman civilisation every day. This means that history is not updated when books or newspaper articles come out. It is updated on a weekly, or even hourly basis. The beauty of tweets, as opposed to blog posts or articles, is that you can share snippets of information, as you get them.

Although the name of this blog post is bizarre it is inspired by the site of a fountain with a big block of ice, serving as a mirror to the tree, and sun, in front of me. The weather is still nicer, more springlike than it has been. More people are out on bikes cycling together. They are taking advantage of the good weather. In theory we could have rain in the next few days but the likelihood, as usual, is very low. An app said that it could be 90 percent certain, but I think it is 100 percent unlikely.

Today I went for a walk and it felt warm enough for me to skip on wearing a layer. It was warm, around six degrees, and sunny. It felt like Spring, and it feels as though cycling could almost be considered. The cycling season is nice. I speak about cycling because I think that this year, like the last two, will be spent in self-isolation until we have zero new cases for two weeks in a row.

Yesterday I read that we will have sun for at least a few more weeks due to a high pressure system over this part of Europe and this afternoon I read that it is snowing in Greece. Normally, out of pandemic I would love sunny days because it would mean climbing, cycling, hiking and more. During a pandemic it means solitary mud while avoiding being run over by cars, walking through the mud to avoid couples, and wearing a mask when you have to be close to others.

Today I went for a cold walk in the wind. The wind was blowing from west to East so for at least half of the walk I had it in my face. This was a good day to wear a cagoule and to wear the face mask, even when people were not around. The windchill made walking unpleasant and I even considered skipping my daily walk but didn’t. I am disciplined enough to walk, even when it is unpleasant. This weather is frustrating because we have the cold, without any of the beauty. It would be nice to have this cold, with snow and ice, rather than just ice.