171: swearing at the shrubbery

Anyone eavesdropping on the Essex Way yesterday afternoon would mostly have been listening to a stream of curses raining down on nettles, people who don’t maintain their footpaths (and in one case actually excavate it with no alternative route posted, although hopefully this is temporary and will reinforce the bank of the River Roding), spiky things that work their way into your socks, farmers who don’t pick up their hay after mowing, the humidity, brambles, cobwebs and more nettles.

Yes, it was our last long training walk before the big event in two weeks’ time, and in our slightly adapted training plan this meant 40k. For both sets of sisters – each with one marathon runner – this translated naturally to a nice round 26.2 miles (42.16k for those of us working in metric). The majority of the Essex Way between North Weald and Pepper’s Green near Chelmsford, where we turned round, is shadeless and cut through crop fields. The ground is so dry, as we’ve had virtually no rain for the best part of five weeks, that the the clay is more like crazy paving with chasms opening up and trapping unwary walking poles.

[brief interlude while I eat this amazing breakfast Tan has just handed me…]

The bits that aren’t cut through crop field are unusually overgrown this year – I’m used to them being well-trodden by dog walkers, but perhaps the heat is keeping them indoors this summer.

Still, we made it – we were lucky enough to see a small group of deer bounding through a field, and heard a lot of skylarks. The River Roding was populated by gorgeous dragonflies, and we saw a cheeky buzzard being chased off by an irate crow. The Willingale Village Day was in full swing as we came through, so we took advantage of their toilets for a quick stop – the PA was audible for a fair way, so we were soundtracked on the outward stretch by the egg and spoon race!

The walk ended up in Co-op, for the now traditional fizzy pop and Calippo fix. Today we’re doing a stretch of the Thames Path in west London for a short 25k, and then we taper before the big event!

To remind you all of why we’re doing this insane amount of walking… check out our page. My big birthday is tomorrow and it would be AMAZING to hit my personal fundraising target as part of that – I’m only £86 short at the moment. Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far – the conversations I’ve been having as I’ve training for this show how devastating a disease Parkinsons can be, and the impact it has on families as well as the sufferer is enormous.

An evening out with Thing 1

On Monday I dragged Thing 1 off with me to see Peter Gabriel at the O2, as he was touring for the first time in 10 years. She likes live music although didn’t really know any of his stuff, but kindly came along with me anyway. He may be 73 but is still putting on a good show!

The show came in at about two hours, with a good mix of the old and new including several from So. Thing 1 liked the faster songs like Digging in the Dirt and the new Panopticom. The first half ended with a high energy Sledgehammer. The usual trio of Tony Levin, Manu Katche and David Rhodes were in place, ably backed by a new touring band including composer, cellist and vocalist Ayana Witter-Johnson who took the Kate Bush parts on Don’t Give Up and harmonies on the lovely In Your Eyes. We missed Biko at the end as we wanted to avoid the tube crush on the Jubilee Line.

There were lots of musings on AI and the connected world, and great visuals – Gabriel is known for his partnerships with other artists and for this tour he’d gone to visual artists including Ai WeiWei and Cornelia Parker to create videos for new material. These are also available as he releases them on his website and YouTube each month with the phases of the moon – including dark side and light side mixes).

We had dinner at Italian Kitchen, which served up an excellent calzone for me and pizza for madam.

Other things making me happy this week…

An evening at the Charterhouse summer event with the work team
An afternoon at Epping Forest District Museum, seeing the Tiger Who Came To Tea exhibition and talking all things museum learning
A morning at the Museum of the Order of St John, including the crypt and the garden
Coffee with Amanda after paddling through torrential rain!
Cuddles with the grandchildren
Carb-loading with a lot of pasta

Right, I’d better go and get ready for the day!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Scandal Takes A Holiday/See Delphi and Die – Lindsey Davis

Back When We Were Grown-ups – Anne Tyler

Carpe Jugulum – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

The Sandman – Neil Gaiman (Audible)

The Mercenary River – Nick Higham

170: yes, but what’s it for?

For the last few weeks I’ve been merrily crocheting maths, in pretty colours and various wavy and wonderful shapes which look like corals and other undersea creatures like nudibranches. The process is pretty simple: you start with a small chain or circle of stitches and keep increasing at the same rate, and after a few rounds or rows the fabric starts to create hyperbolic geometry. Nature likes hyperbolic forms as it maximises the surface area of a life form – perfect for filter feeding organisms like corals to get the most out of their environment. Curly lettuces also have this hyperbolic geometry (or negative curvature),

In 1997 Dr Daina Taimina, a professor at Cornell University, discovered that the best way for humans to make models which demonstrate this geometry is with crochet – just by modifying the basic crochet code you can create these weird and wonderful shapes. She wrote a book about it, explaining the history and development of non-Euclidean geometry and its applications to art, music, computer science and all sorts of other clever things. It’s the only maths book I have ever read for fun, thanks to cousin Sal who needed a model made for demonstrating the concept of hyperbolic space to teenagers.

It also demonstrates exponential growth, which we all heard far too much about in the early days of this blog in the guise of the R-number. Associate Professor of biostatistics and owner of the science/knitting blog https://www.statistrikk.no/, Kathrine Frey Froslie, used the technique to create a visual version of the way Covid-19 was spreading. You can watch a video about it here.

I’m using patterns from the Crochet Coral Reef project by Christine Wertheim & Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring. “The Crochet Coral Reef is an artwork responding to climate change and also a global community-based exercise in applied mathematics and evolutionary theory.”

This makes me sound ever so clever, doesn’t it. I’m not going to pretend I understand the maths behind it all but I do understand that the process of making these is repetitive, and mindful, and while I’m trying to download a whole new job into my brain that’s exactly what I need from a project! So that’s what they’re for.

Other things making me happy this week…

This Spotify playlist – a weird and wonderful blend of music for long walks
Walking as a team yesterday – also weird and wonderful.
Orange Calippo lollies
A surprise fern from the Young V&A team in case I’d forgotten them
Getting up to date on the Temperature Supernova
Early morning walks
A day off when I got pampered by Thing 1 as part of her last assessments

Now I must go and do some dinner…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

A Body in the Bathhouse/The Jupiter Myth/The Accusers – Lindsey Davis

Noah’s Compass/Back When We Were Grown-ups – Anne Tyler

Carpe Jugulum – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

The Mercenary River – Nick Higham

169: some sentences strung together

Nope, I’ve got nothing.

No, I tell a lie: I have an impressive set of mosquito bites, aching feet (but no blister, thanks to Tan’s latest tape discovery) and a massive pile of ironing that requires attention. What I don’t have is a blog post…

Yesterday Tan and I tackled a 32km walk starting and ending in Goring, which took in a section of the Ridgeway, a stretch of the Thames Path and a whole lot of very nice houses to look at. I under-fuelled and had a funny turn in the last 10k (lying in the grass was probably where the mossie bites came from). Kendal Mint Cake came to the rescue with one of their new electrolyte bars and I survived to do a much slower walk in the shady forest this morning. I also went for a dip in the lake this morning: no swimming occurred, but I really needed the cold water.

And now I am going for a nap.

See you next week.

Kirsty x

Ode to a Banker/The Body in the Bath House – Lindsey Davis

Maskerade – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

The Mercenary River – Nick Higham

Under the Whispering Door – T.J.Klune

168: I ain’t superstitious

What is is about magpies? Three of my friends – all from various bits of Yorkshire, which may or may not be a coincidence – behave very oddly when they see one. One of them asks where its wife is, one asks after the health of its wife and children, and the third forks his fingers and spits between them as if warding off the evil eye. In all other ways this third one is possibly one of the most gentlemanly people I know, but when a magpie is foolish enough to come into his field of vision he gets all medieval.

It’s only solo magpies, apparently: more than one is absolutely fine. Jill even knows the numbers after seven in the one-for-sorrow, two-for-joy rhyme – it gets a bit post-watershed from eight onwards, it turns out. There’s more information here about it all, anyway, and it turns out some places even consider them to be lucky. In Sussex if a magpie sits on your roof it means your house won’t fall down, which I would find quite reassuring.

“There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them is very reliable because they are not the ones that the magpies know themselves.
Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

You may wonder why magpies are on my mind this week. Previously I have waxed lyrical on how entertaining I find the baby magpies in the garden, as they’re scrappy and scruffy and play like children. I have felt sorry for the mama magpie, who comes and sits on next door’s roof for a bit of peace. There’s a nest at the end of the garden, so they’re a constant presence.

However, I do not love them quite as much as I did, as this year’s brood have taken to sitting on the guttering above our bedroom window at dawn every morning and starting their day with a noisy discussion about whatever it is magpies feel the need to debate at that hour of the day. I would go so far as to say that these six would be very unlucky indeed*, if I was able to fly.

(*not really, as long as they shut up.)

Things making me happy this week:

Still crocheting octopuses, although I did branch out into a hyperbolic coral thing
Baby horses spotted on my walk yesterday
A field full of hares on an early morning wander
Still my new job
Strawberries from the garden
The garden full of kids, grandkids, dogs, Timeshare Teenagers, and various extras, and my Beloved is in charge of the barbecue.

And on that note, I’ve done my walking for the weekend and there’s a bottle of Rattler with my name on it in the fridge.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Two for the Lions/One Virgin Too Many/Ode to a Banker – Lindsey Davies

That Mitchell and Webb Sound S1-5 (Audible)

Exploring The New River – Michael Essex-Lopresti