Ireland day 0346. Friday 09 September 2022- CatchingUp

Today’s summary	Val was at work so I spent the morning catching up on more paperwork and doing the shopping. Nice walk round the marina with Val in the evening
Today’s weather	Heavy rain overnight. Mostly dry and bright with some sun during the day. Light northerly wind. About 18C

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The green line shows where I walked) (No GPX today but click the button below to download a TCX of the morning gym session): Friday gym

Commentary

There isn’t a lot to say about today, actually, so I won’t spend a long time not saying it.

In a pattern that is rapidly earning the description “well established”, Val went off to work this morning and I went to the gym. I’m getting to quite like it – well perhaps not like it so much as not dislike it as much as I did. After ten sessions using all the machines etc. I sort of know what I am supposed to do and don’t feel like quite such a total plonker. But I am still disappointingly flabby and lacking in bodybuilder musculature. Maybe when I’ve been a hundred times I will start to feel like I am getting somewhere. But of course the upsetting thing about becoming a beautiful person – as I am shortly about to be – is that as soon as you stop all this ridiculous amount of exercise, you just become grey and overweight again. So unfortunately it’s a bit of a one-way ticket.

Once the gym was out of the way, I went back to the flat and did some more paperwork. I’m still struggling with tax (it’s too obscure and complicated to explain) but I feel like we are starting to make some headway. Perhaps in a month or two we might have got it sorted out. Here’s hoping, because I just can’t believe how long it has taken.

Eventually I’d despatched this perennial headache and it was time to dial in to a video discussion with my group of former colleagues from the Natural History Museum in London. Today the discussion topic was “ethics in scientific publication” which left us all concluding that as young students none of us – and we came from the UK, Israel and Spain – had ever been taught ethics at school or college, and perhaps we, and others more widely, might have benefitted if we had been.

By the time we finished it was getting well on into the afternoon and Val left me with a shopping list with strict instructions that I had to have bought everything on it by the time she got home. So I dashed off back to the shops and came back armed with cabbages, potatoes, parsnips, onions eggs and sausages – all the ingredients for toad in the hole. actually.

So we did indeed enjoy this delicious sausage dish for dinner, and excellent it was, too. Then, because Val had been indoors all day, as soon as I had finished the washing up, we decided to take an evening walk down Hanlon’s Lane and the marina. It was a pleasant night, with the sun’s dying embers lighting up the western horizon just as a silvery almost-full moon rose in the east. A relaxing end to a pleasant and relatively undemanding day.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


The Green in Malahide town centre. In the middle is the bronze of the woman with the ammonite. It’s sometimes known as Anna Livia – the name is probably derived from the Irish “Abhainn na Life”, which is the Irish name for the river Liffey. It’s also the name of one of the characters in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” The original Anna Livia statue is in Dublin, where it was known as “The floozie in the jacuzzi”	The shamrocks on our balcony are doing amazingly well. And they don’t look a bit like clover! But I need to get some more pots and potting compost to repot them before all the roots get tangled up and inseparable

Val made Toad in the Hole for dinner tonight – proper food – solid, nutritious and relatively inexpensive.



The marina by tonight. Looking very exclusive in the moonlight