Another country scratched from my virtual map of blog views this week with one from Papua New Guinea. I suspect it was a miss-click or a link that Google just placed near the top in a search for something quite different. I don’t get much information on people who view (and why should I?) – only the country and the actual page viewed, and even all that only at aggregate level for the day. I will see if I get more views from there in the future, and it has intrigued me. I know very little about Papua New Guinea, apart from that the capital is Port Moresby, it is the eastern part of an island north of Australia, and has more vowels than consonants (not that unusual, there are 41 countries in total), and even the equal highest percentage of vowels (60%), unless one abbreviates United Arab Emirates to UAE, but there again PNG would then be all consonants. That would negate another worthless fact that United Arab Emirates is the country with the longest name with alternate vowels and consonants (there are 34 such countries)….. Potential for this to be the most boring blog post ever, so let’s move on now.
I’ve been as happy and contented as for a while this week. I can’t put my finger on it for definite but it may be due to eating more healthily. Perhaps there are some chemical changes in me, or perhaps it’s nice to even think I’m becoming healthier, losing about four pounds in weight over the week. I can’t say that I have especially missed sugar in my tea, crisps, biscuits, chocolates and cakes but it would be reasonable to assume that I might have an occasional one without falling off whatever mini-wagon onto which I might have clambered. But I am happier and semi-enthused about walking. I am keeping the walks not inordinately lengthy, being mindful of looking after myself and without the latent energy, purpose and confidence in fitness to stretch further at present.
In warm weather, 10 miles is sufficient to constitute ticking over, to build up some sweat with one or two good speed-walking sections and a hill here and there. As I was out, I was poking at the brain’s abacus to reckon that a finish at around 2:40pm would be sufficiently early for me to get in, shower, change and then listen to Pompey blow their promotion chances pull off a massive win at Burton. It would also equate to roughly 10 miles if walking at normal pace. As always, it is vital to use the words something, like, around, about or roughly before citing trivial points with autistic accuracy. I arrived home at precisely 2:40pm and the Google Maps route came out as precisely 10.0 miles.
It was beautiful today. I wandered lonely as a cloud, the only one in the sky it seemed, with a good mix of off-road, paths, side roads and main roads in reaching my double figured distance. It was novel to find how quiet the world was once more than about 50 yards from a main road. One could really find peace in the stillness, like turning the sound down on the world, even for a few minutes, with my footsteps sometimes the only matter in my audible range. Ah, eunoia – the shortest word in the English language with all five vowels. To put you out of your, er, whatever the opposite of eunoia is. It comes from the Greek word εὔνοια, meaning “well mind” or “beautiful thinking”. It is so rare that it doesn’t even appear in many dictionaries.
Hopefully it won’t be rare for me.
Spiceboy's Very Long Walk 