Skip to main content

'Slow' cycling in the Guardian

Peter Walker of the Guardian muses about the journey vs. the destination, via bicycle, in this recent blog post.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When a clock falls silent

With the shuttering of Big Ben for the next few years, commentators have tied the distress over the great clock's silence to the fact that it is coinciding with Brexit . But is it more than that? What does this historic clock that is so vividly seen and heard really mean to Londoners and the tourists who flock to it? The silencing of Big Ben — and the attendant hand-wringing over it — is an object lesson in the extent to which the visual and auditory symbols of timekeeping insinuate themselves into our lives. (Leaving aside for the moment that Big Ben is the bell, not the clock.) "No one needs Big Ben to tell the time," wrote Anne Perkins in The Guardian . "It depends what you value."
Post a Comment
Read more

Book review: "The Greenwich Time Lady"

From PopMatters.com : With its brusque opening lines ("What time is it? It’s a simple question and this book looks at some of the ways we have tried to answer it over the last couple of hundred years"), Ruth Belville: The Greenwich Time Lady plunges the reader headlong into a densely packed gem of a history—one that author David Rooney, curator of timekeeping at the British Royal Observatory, is uniquely qualified to tell. The book’s eponymous heroine was the last in a short line of Belvilles who made their living in a unique manner: they literally brought time itself from the Greenwich Royal Observatory to a London subscriber base that included shopkeepers, shipping firms and clockmakers. Through a tenuous and complex arrangement with the observatory’s Astronomer General, the Belvilles were granted weekly entry to the observatory, where a clerk would adjust their steadfast watch (nicknamed “Arnold” after its maker, John Arnold) to the correct time and provide a certificate d...
1 comment
Read more