Ireland day 1108. Thursday 10 October 2024- Waiting and Learning

Today’s summary	Val was at work at the castle all day. I spent the morning waiting for a planned call about my histology results, which never happened. In the afternoon I want on a long walk down through Portmarnock and back along the coast. In the evening Val and I drove into the Botanics to attend a lecture on the evolution of plants
Today’s weather	Bright dry and sunny all day. Strong northerly wind. Appx 10c

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where I walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Extended coastal loop walk

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

This morning the surgeon who removed the lesion from my chin a month ago was supposed to call me with the histology results. So I waited in by the telephone but, to paraphrase Kirsty McColl “When the phone didn’t ring, I knew it wasn’t you”. So I phoned his secretary who said that the call had been cancelled (though nobody had let me know) and she would sort it out. “Leave it with me” she said confidently.

Anyway needless to say I never heard anything so I am going to forget about it for now. I’m pretty sure that if anything adverse was going on, they would have called me by now. But the waiting time wasn’t wasted! I did my Spanish homework, which this week was about the difference between qué and quien. It’s all to do with verbs, nouns, similar things and different things. Simple. And I also did a couple of loads of washing, which all passed the time perfectly.

While all this wasn’t happening, Val was busily engaged working at the Castle. She was pretty much in sole charge of the main desk, so was pretty busy. When she got back this evening, she said, unsurprisingly, that the time had flown by. A very productive was to spend the day.

But returning to the flat… By the time I’d given up on the medical profession and done all the chores I could thing of, it was approaching 1pm so I got a late breakfast and decided to go out into the sunshine for a walk. It looked lovely from this side of the glass, with brilliant sunshine streaming down from a clear blue sky. Foolishly, I didn’t look at the weather forecast so I set off in T-shirt and shorts which became immediately obviously unsuitable for the weather as soon as I stepped outside. A cold northerly wind whipped around my bare legs and I lasted all of about ten paces before I had to stop to put on my fleece and windproof jacket.

I headed on over the hill and down to Portmarnock, meaning to walk on to Howth. But midway I suddenly remembered that we were going out this evening – of which more below – so I needed to be back in reasonable time. So I pivoted in Portmarnock and made my way over to the beach, from where I could head directly back t Malahide via the coast.

I stopped off in SuperValu to get some salt for our new dishwasher, then made it back to the flat by about 4:30. I got myself a late lunch / early dinner and had a cup of coffee then changed out of my chilly shorts so I was ready to go out as soon as Val was back from work.

Tonight we’ re driving into the Botanic Gardens to listen to a lecture on “500 million years of plant evolution”. Readers will notice, by the way, that nowadays we are driving into Dublin for evening events, rather than going by public transport, as it’s quicker, warmer and generally more pleasant.

The lecture was given by Dr Darach Lupton, curator of the Botanic Gardens. It was excellent, and charted in easy-to-understand terms the evolution of plants from a green ocean-living slime 500 million years ago, to the vast diversity of plants – probably around half a million species – that we know today. We both really enjoyed it and learned a lot. We were particularly fascinated by the giant Coco-de-Mer seed and the matchbox containing one seed from all 834 native Irish plant species, both of which we were allowed to inspect “hands on”.

So a very satisfactory end to the day, after a slightly disappointing start.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Looking over the Robswall roofs and out of Europe to the Mournes – the hazy grey blobs on the horizon	Sooner him than me – it was freezing!

A healthy looking specimen of threadleaf ragwort (Senecio flaccidus) – I think – growing by the golf course entrance to Portmarnock beach. It’s an invasive species in Ireland and originally comes from the south west United States	Brent Geese (the two birds at the left) seem to have returned to Malahide after their summer sojourn in Greenland

Ready to start	An unusually bright display of Aurora is said to be visible in parts of Ireland tonight – but sadly nothing doing in the Botanics! Still, a nice view of the greenhouses by night

I found this absolutely remarkable and quite thought provoking