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.”
When I read books i read to be transported back to a different time and a different way of thinking. That’s why i read James Bond books, among others. The books are old-fashioned but it is that obsolescence that makes them interesting.
They take us to a time before travel as we know it today. Imagine reading about being sun burned and sun oil. Imagine reading about speeding cars. Imagine reading about a time before road safety laws and speed limits. Imagine reading about when scuba diving was still exotic and more.
Recently people have been reading old books and destroying them by changing words and meanings. By editing books to be socially acceptable today we are behaving like the priest with a bell in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Do you remember the scene. Clang clang clang, insert a paper into the film reel where the kiss has to be spliced out.
The morality police isn’t splicing kisses or sex. It is neutralising gender, offensive terms and more. Words that make children giggle and laugh are being removed by grown ups.
They, the adults, see this as a social good but I don’t. In the age of Brexit, COVID denialism and a shift by political parties to the Far Right why are we worrying about books when the real social ill comes from what politicians are saying, of how populism is being used, to mislead people to vote against their own best interests?
A book is just a glimpse into the past and i am worried about the present.
My view on books is that we read them to understand how people saw the world before, whether from the 90s, the 50s or a century ago. We read Jane Austen A) because our English teacher told us to, but second to understand a different age and way of seeing the contemporary world. The world, contemporary to the writer, not to us.
I remember reading The Tiger that came to tea, thinking, “this is old fashioned and sexist” but that doesn’t stop me from reading it for a sibling’s offspring. Instead, it would be an opportunity for a well brought up child to say “but that tiger was not kind, that tiger was rude, and so was the dad when he came home.”
This brings me on to “All Creatures Great and Small”. “Oh I do wish you would pay attention” and more. Siegfried tells James off on a number of occassions for what he told James to do. James gets angry, but doesn’t say anything.
The issue with sensitivity readers is that they are moving on to adult books, with adult themes. James Bond is old fashioned, but if it is re-written then it loses some if its allure. I read James Bond while working in a humanitarian organisation. I knew that it was written in a different age, when people had different values and norms.
I worry about what contemporaries think, say and write, rather than what people wrote 60 to seventy years ago. The past is the past. Modern conversations, and modern books should reflect modern values. Will old films be re-edited to remove smoking? Will old films be edited for modern values?
Where will the line be drawn, on changing the past, to suit the views of people today?
Roald Dahl was edited for modern audiences but the originals are still available, so you can have the “modern politically correct version” or the old fashioned historical version. Will you read the old fashioned version, and have a conversation about values, or read the sanitised version, and skip the conversation on morality and ethics?
Normally I walk from village to village. My walks can take me through four to six villages per walk. I walk from village to village in part because I live in the middle of a landscape where walking from village to village is easy.
I had doubts about today’s run because I can feel various parts of my legs. I can feel that they are under a different strain than usual, due to the running. I felt fine when I was running, but after sitting I could feel ligaments and tendons. I find myself considering taking proper rest days where I don’t walk at least ten thousand steps as I think that running and walking puts a lot of strain on my body. It could simply be that I need to perfect my running technique.
I seriously considered delaying the run. I started walking and when I felt fine I decided to run, and when I ran I felt fine for the entire run. I was ready to stop running when I met the required distance for today. Somehow the running distance, and what I feel comfortable running are well matched.
The next run will be on Sunday. 2.4 kilometres should be easier than this three kilometre run. After that it will be a four kilometre run. I think that for that one I will either run by the lake or around the Lac De Divonne.
I am getting close to running the distance I set out to run. From then on it will be about having the discipline not to push to cover a bigger distance, and to work on style and speed. I don’t want to make the same mistake as I did a few years ago. The aim is comfort, and time, over distance. The run and walk combination is working well for me.
Almost two decades ago we had Google Latitude. Google Latitude allowed us to share real time location with friends and family 24 hours a day. We didn’t need to ask “Where are you” because there was already an app for that. Today I saw “Google’s real-time location is here: this is how it works” as a headline. I have to ask, do the writers study their history before writing their articles or is anything that wasn’t in their own lifetime brand new?
This is an old feature from the mid to late 2000s that was removed bit by bit because people worried about privacy complained. We went from being able to share our location 24 hours a day to it being on demand for a limited time, to having a lifetime history of locations to it being removed from new users.
I am grandfathered in to the original Google Latitude so I have location history spanning back to 2007-2008 or so. I love this, because it allows me to see when I travelled, and how fast I travelled. If I see that I got from Spain to Switzerland in an hour I know I went by plane. If I see that I went from Geneva to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Romania or Poland then I know that was another flight. I can see where I was and when.
I can also see how much I cycled and walked, and how much I drove or took trains in a month. With iCloud you have live location sharing too, but it’s restricted to the people you want to share with, for example when you’re driving from A to B, or when you have family sharing enabled.
Years ago I said that I don’t mind Google or Apple, or other companies knowing where I am, because telecom providers have that information anyway, so if they have it, so should I. My fvourite use was to check “The car got a fine at this location on that day but at that time on that day I was at the gym so I wasn’t the one driving the car.
By sharing your location with Google latitude it gives you information about whether an event could have been you or not. I wasn’t worried about the fine, or paying it. I wanted to confirm that my drivers were not slipping back into the habit of getting fines again. At one time I drove so much that fines were no longer rare. I eventually saw phantom flashes and switched to always setting the limiter to the speed limit.
It boils down to one phrase. Live location sharing with Google is not new. It was removed because people worried about Google knowing too much about where they had been and where, and they wanted to remove location history. Now we are finally seeing the reverse coming back into being. Live location sharing, as well as location history is useful. I am happy to see that it is coming back.
