So you’ve come across barefoot shoes, you’re interested in minimal foot-ware or you are simply health concious. Maybe you are on this page because I gave you a link to it. Actually I am only writing this, because I wanted to give you a link to it and because I can’t remember all the interesting things about bare-foot/minimal shoes, gait, all the research and scientists behind it. And I need to remember all that, because I’ll gladly have a conversation with every-one of you who have asked me over the last days, weeks and months about what’s on my feet.
It usually starts when you and your friend stick your heads together start whispering. Or you’re one of the genuinely delighted people who literally jump at the sight of the shoes and start asking high pitched questions in sheer delight. That makes my day, too! Those things are Vibram Fivefingers, and they are very very comfy shoes, if you ask me. My Fivefingers are actually the first pair of shoes that I don’t take off when I get home after a long day at work. With “smart shoes” as the fashionistas tend to call those pointy high-heeled pinky-crushers, my natural urge is to is to push them off my feet without even opening the laces as soon as I’m through the door. The arch of my foot hurts, there a spot on the heels where the socks are wearing thin and my toes feel as if they were a single fused appendix of raw soreness. But not so with my thin-soled toe-shoes, and it’s not that to don’t take them off because I like wearing them so much, but because I forget that I’m wearing shoes in the first place. That comfy.
I thought I’d explore the UK’s south coast on foot this year, as I really enjoyed the BBC series “Coast”, I like being near the seaside, and the south coast is in easy reach with train services providing easy and convenient access.
But this walk from Brighton heading east, quite frankly sucks. Heading out of town and towards the marina, your feet and soul begin to ache at the sight of a generic out of town shopping/entertainment mall where the pedestrian access along the rising chalk cliffs should be the main attraction, but instead is marginalised and funnelled through a maze of concrete. The footpath winds through the left over spaces that emerged when the quickest (and laziest, in terms of imagination and planning) vehicular access route from Brighton into the marina was designed. Or shall I say, engineered. The road comes high from the cliff tops, and its propped up lanes cut through the landscape with no regard to topography, landscape or urban design. Effectively it is a high-level box-section bridge that rests on cylindrical posts and slopes wearily down to the shopping/cinema complex, dissecting cliffs, beach and sea.
The trail crosses extensive car parks and a bland, repetitive cluster of predictable apartment blocks before the ending a shabby industrial section of the marina, where pedestrians are forced to double back on themselves because fences and a boat park obstruct clear access. From there on, you have no choice but walk for miles along a concrete enforced coastal path, that is more reminiscent of dismal military enforcements than the liberating junction of sea and land.
I shall certainly not return to this stretch of coast.
On the last weekend in (more or less) sunny September I went for a walk a long the Sussex coastline. I took the train to Eastbourne, then headed to the beach and followed it West towards Beachy Head. The beach is actually a cliff face with boulders and other rock debris that has fallen from the soft chalk cliffs, and further down towards the waterline the ground consists of slippery plates of chalky rock-bed. It’s an enjoyable scrabble over the rocks, and during the receding tide you have to be careful not to slip as the chalky stone can be very slippery, so naturally my eyes where fixed on the ground to search for a good foothold on every step.
Then I saw something that took a few moments to process in before I could make sense of it. I saw what looked like “imprints” of limpets in the rock. Shallow oval grooves the size of a limpet’s footprint covered the rock face as well as living limpets themselves. Close-up many of these imprints showed the detailed ridges of a limpet shell engraved in the rock. [click to continue…]
A thick cover of duckweed floats on Regent’s Canal this summer. It forms such a thick carpet that even the occasional passing barge can only temporarily clear the surface in its wake, before the green carpet once more looks as undisturbed as if had been laying there for months.
I‘m a fan of bread. I love home made bread. I love sourdough bread, traditional loaves, Pumpernickel, Baguette, speciality breads, bread with cheese, seeds, onions, spices – this blog is small to list them all. In short, there are enough types of bread around to keep anyone happy any day of the year. In short the word bread doesn’t do the varieties that exist no justice.
Wikipedia claims that there are “About 600 main types of breads” in Germany alone. Which is (as a German living in the UK) I can’t wrap my head around why a large part of the English bread market is “stuff in bags”. And more importantly, I wanted to know what is in the stuff. Let’s have a look.
Wholemeal Breads
There are a few things to look out for in food labelling. There are tell-tale so dodgy product around. Food labelling is a minefield, and the laws of food labelling are in my opinion not doing the consumer justice, because often the consumer doesn’t know what an ingredient really means. There’s a website dedicated to sources of MSG here: http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html
One of my favourite travel web-sites is the fabulous Atlas Obscura. If it didn’t exist, one would have to invent it. Although I doubt I would be able of such great feat myself.
To make a long story short, it’s simply a fantastic sight to visit, for everyone interested in Landscape design, sculptures, overgrown gardens, romanticism, esoterica or whatever morbid fantasies may draw you there. Even a cold and cloudy Easter Saturday made a worth while trip. Entry is £7 for an hour-long guided tour. The guides are volunteers and the money goes towards funding restoration, which the place is in dire need of.
As the lady the lead my group noted:
We don’t receive any government money so it’s more of a case of managed neglect.
I often tune into documentaries, radio programmes etc while at work. I work in 3D graphics, which often involves almost mechanical tasks, like checking and converting endless iterations of data sets as assets for crating 3D environments. They are mind-numbingly simple and should be automated, only, I’m not a good script writer, and secondly, until a script can handle the info in the required way for a one-off project, you’re better off doing it by hand. Anyway, I need to entertain my mind, and listening to info porn documentaries has become my latest obsession.
It’s this time of the year of intense colours, the low warm ray of the sun streaking in jagged beams through windows, leaves and parks. The air humid and with a cool chill to the skin, the silence only broken by the bristle sound of beechnuts, acorns and chestnuts breaking the first fry leaves on the forest floor.
