In normal times we can walk along clean paths, without walking through the mud because we can walk within a meter or two of people. During a pandemic though, the recommendation is to be at least two meters from people. Many agricultural paths are not that wide, especially when people walk two or more abreast.
This means that if we’re walking alone either we have to give in to not respecting the two meter rule or we walk in the mud, fields, or other. It also means that rather than take the usual walking paths that we have taken for years beforehand we are now migrating to the edges of roads.
We are exposed to the cars driving too fast and too close. We are exposed to grass that has grown tall, and thorns, and the noise of car tires on tarmac. Before the pandemic I would not have noticed that noise, but now I can’t stand it. The sound of tearing, ripping or similar sound. The sight of people staring at their phones whilst driving too close to us, in their cars.
Over the last eleven months I have found a route that I like to walk, where I don’t need to avoid people, avoid the noise of cars, avoid having to overcome my fear of dogs, and in most cases, avoid having to backtrack to avoid walking within two meters of people.
Of course I am eccentric. We’re in the eleventh month of a pandemic. I have spent this time in pandemic solitude and it has had an impact. I question whether the passion and pleasure I take in walking along quiet routes is a coping method, a way of dealing with the solitude, of being solitary rather than lonely.
Recently I learned that a cleaner complained about the mud I brought back into the building but this year has been quite wet. I also found that the quietest, safest walking routes, are also the muddiest.
The school where I went as a child was built between 1901 and 1902. As a result of this it had metal projections near the entrance so that you could scrape your shoes before you went into the building. Those are not present on modern buildings.
Modern buildings, and modern carpets are designed for car driver dirty feet rather than rural dirty feet. They are decoration rather than of any use. We live in an age where despite being parents, with young children, many people have grown out of the habit of dealing with mud. We live in the tyranny of the car driver. An entire building’s footprint is devoted to cars, but nothing is kept to clear muddy shoes of mud.
One of the issues with modern expectations is that people get into their car, drive to do their walk, and then drive home. If you leave your home without taking the car, then the absurd reality of getting muddy shoes, and for the shoes not to dry and flake before you get home is alien.
In a normal situation either mud would flake from my hiking shoes into the boot, or they would flake as I drive the car home, on the driver side floor. Cultural norms have forgotten that there was a time when getting home with muddy shoes was ordinary.
I took a picture of a building where people would come home with muddy shoes. Society says that it wants us to reduce our carbon footprint but muddy shoes are a distant memory. Society has forgotten about the habit of walking locally. Society has forgotten about the need for proper shoe cleaning options by the door.
I did try four solutions. The first is to find a puddle, and try to evacuate the mud from my shoes that way. It does work to some degree, but then you leave a mess of wet, rather than dry mud. The second option is to walk during a rainy day. The advantage of rainy days is that your shoes are cleaned by the rain constantly, so you often get home nice and clean. The third option is to walk on a snowy day, as the snow will wear away the dirt and mud from your shoes. The fourth option is to scrape your shoes with a pointy thing. I tried with a screwdriver and with a bike tool for removing tyres.
Although it may sound counterintuitive I found that the best way not to be have muddy shoes is to walk on a rainy day because the rain will drain away the mud and dirt. It may seem counterintuitive but rain really is the best. The second
Spending time outdoors and coming back muddy is nothing new. It has been part of my character for less time than I can remember. I see no problem in a little bit of mud because mud is very easy to clean. It’s especially easy to clean when it’s dry, rather than wet. When I started to make a conscious effort not to bring mud back into the building one day I noticed that instead of nice, healthy organic mud, one day we had the dirty traces of petroleum based wet dirt on the floor. We had pollution from too many people using cars.
As messy as mud may make hallways look I think the black traces of carbon rain is worse. The door mat is good at pretending that the problem doesn’t exist, but when you see the traces after a day of rain, you think “If only it was mud. If only I picked up a shoe and noticed a spider scurry away.”
As unsightly as mud is, things can live in it. Nothing lives in the polluted water, from a car based way of life.
I’d like to conclude with “I did think of taking my shoes off as I came into the building, to avoid muddying the floors, but then I thought of everyone else not doing that. I also thought that it’s a shame that other people do not get muddier shoes, because then I would regain my freedom. Walking in the mud is a freedom that we have lost over the centuries.
It is not unusual for me to take my trousers off when I get home, and to rinse them in the shower, like I used to do after going scuba diving.
If I was a cleaner I would have said “Since the floor gets messy so quickly it may be worth me coming two to three times a week to clean up.”
Today during my walk this afternoon I surprised a cat on some stairs and I moved patiently. It brushed up against me so I started to stroke it. During this pandemic the only living things I have had physical contact with are cats. During a pandemic, if you’re not living with people, you are very limited.
Yesterday I did go out for a bike ride with a group of people, virtually. Before the ride I was feeling really down, and negative. After the ride I was feeling refreshed and relaxed. For the first time in three weeks I was able to do something physical without having to avoid people, worry about routing or anything else. All I had to do was pedal to the limit of my motivation and endurance.
If we went into full lock down then I would treat it as if we were in winter. I’d train hard, on the indoor trainer, so that when we are finally allowed more freedom in the outdoors I’d be fit enough to explore new routes.
When I went to the shops they were the emptiest I’ve seen them in a long time. I didn’t even need to queue to get in, although I did have a brief moment of over-exaggerating my steps as I was behind people walking slower than me. Everyone, or almost, walks slower than me, so that’s not a criticism of the people ahead of me. It’s good for you. You can use entirely different muscle groups as you behave in an eccentric manner. Even the self-checkout was empty, just one other person.
Of course in the process I forgot to buy plain rice so now I’m going to have to cook with wild rice today. I think playing the COVID-19 lottery, by going to the shops once a day, is risky enough. Wild rice is meant to be healthier anyway.
According to the figures I see, and articles in the press, it seems that the Pandemic has reached a plateau and we may be able to feel optimistic about the end coming in two or three weeks. Of course we have to be wary. With good weather more people are going out to enjoy the conditions, and the likelihood of another flareup is high if people are not careful.
Having said this I saw a tweet that the Canton De Vaud judiciary is going to start work again today, I saw that a shop selling coffee was open again and that a pet shop was open again too. These could be seen as signs, that more people are optimistic that things are improving.
I see that people are discussing whether society will have changed when this is all over and I believe that it will not have because of two key reasons. The first is that the wealthy, those with the power to effect change, will not have suffered like those that do not have the power to effect change. As a result many things will remain the same.
The second factor is rate of infection. When China was infected every other nation on earth had the opportunity to react, but as we see, after Italy was infected, no societies changed. Switzerland, France, Spain, The United Kingdom and the United States did not change.
It took governments saying “stay home, and self-isolate” for people to take action. To me this is a clear sign that the societal change people idealise is just that, an ideal.
Update: Victorian England was afraid of germs and diseases, which is why they wore white gloves and tried to keep their homes clean. The problem is that the paint they used to cover their walls was poisoning them, as was makeup and other elements of everyday life.
I have seen the headline in French and English that according to some people, the earth is less seismically active than usual. As none of the reputable news services have written about this story I am seeing it as just a curiousity, rather than something serious. It’s more likely that with less traffic, whether cars, trucks or planes, that seismometers, may detect less background noise.
In theory now would be the perfect time to have the LHC running, as there is less background noise.
Today I could have taken the scooter to some shops but I went for a walk. The result of that walk is that I reached twenty one thousand five hundred steps. I often take a lot of steps per day. I wish I was walking somewhere more interesting than in circles.
According to Sports tracker my daily workouts saved 4.74 kilograms of CO2 this month.
I was amused during this walk. The wind is so strong at the moment that as I tried to play the Harmonica as I walked into the wind I found that the wind itself was playing my harmonica. If I blew then I won, but if I drew then I was competing against the wind. Boring people get wind chimes. I think that people should get harmonicas instead of wind chimes. Wind chimes are audio kitsch. Harmonicas are not, because they’re rarer.
This recording is from yesterday’s walk in the wind rather than today’s. The audio was recorded from the airpods, I think. I wasn’t sure you would hear the harmonica over the sound of the wind but it worked.
The wind has to be going at, at least, 25km/h if I remember correctly for the reeds to resonate enough to make noise.
In other news I have read more than once that trawlers are now trawling for krill within superods of whales. I read a few days ago about how fishermen are hoovering the sea of krill to feed farmed salmon. Humans are destroying the sea to such a degree that they are now hoovering up krill, leading to whales and other mammals to starve. We should not be wasting money and fuel to farm something in a juvenile state. It’s bad enough that humans destroy other parts of the marine food chain but this is a step too far.
As a diver people always asked “But what is there to see when you dive” and the truth is “nothing, because of overfishing, in Swiss lakes and the mediterranean. The paradox is that with a marine reserve aquatic life comes back and thrives quite easily. People fly to Fiji and other locations to see plenty of fish but if Europeans, and others, worked to preserve their marine diversity, through marine parks then we would have more fish to see underwater. The marine eco-system needs us to leave it alone, to recover, so that fish reach maturity, so that we see large whales, fish and more.
I have managed to neutralise the inner censors. I have accomplished ninety five days of blogging in a row, once again. During the first 100+ days of the pandemic I did the same. At the time I thought that this would provide a document of how life was for the pandemic. The pandemic has lasted over 540 days and I eventually lost inspiration, and inspiration for new things to write.
This is a longer challenge than NaNoWriMo because it lasts for 95 days so far, and it has no end day. I don’t need to write three thousand words a day. I don’t even need to write three hundred words a day. I write this arbitrary number of words each day because I read that it’s better for SEO. The truth is that I don’t get any visits for most posts.
The point of blogging every day is to train oneself to sit in front of a blank text box and write. Some days the words will flow, and other days they will fall over each other and dam up the river of inspiration. This doesn’t matter. Writing doesn’t need to be good. It needs to be consistant.
My goal, and my hope, is to get myself into the habit of sitting down at a notes app, text document or other, and be able to write something interesting, without worrying. I want ideas to flow. I can edit later.
By changing from Amazon.de to Amazon.fr I have a new selection of books. I grew tired of using amazon.de because it is so hard to search through for English books. By using Amazon.fr I have found that there are numerous books about hiking in France, and Europe. This is great, because I spend a lot of time reading about hiking, for hikes that I would not do. Those that are in Europe are just a train journey away, and that’s good. It means it is realistic to try them. Especially the short ones.
We are going into the cold, dark months. The days of long nights, and short days, of fog and clouds. Now is a good time to retreat indoors and read and find inspiration for next summer. The probability that the pandemic is over by then is low, but we can always pretend to be optimistic. I will blog about the books, either individually, or as a group, when I get through one or more.
It finally feels like Autumn, at least for today. The rivers are still empty so we still need a lot of rain. At least for one day Switzerland felt like it had seasons.
Walking in heavy rain for two and a half hours doesn’t make much sense. You don’t see much. The more time you spend outside the more of you is wet, and by the time you get home you’re cold and in need of warming up.
It’s day 57, the 11th of May. In theory Switzerland has rebooted in safe mode and we can start returning to normal life. I don’t know whether the shops or other places were busy because I didn’t go into any shops.
