"One man who has already walked that perimeter in its entirety is the photographer Quintin Lake, who did so over 454 days in spells between 2015 and 2020..."

"... walking 12 to 24 miles each day. But in order to achieve his mission he had to frequently cut inland to walk along roads or trespass over private land. 'There was a lot of climbing over fences and having a series of unpleasant encounters with people saying: "What are you doing on my land?,"' said Lake, 50.... 'From a hiker’s point of view, when you have a well-maintained path and good waymarking it just makes it much more relaxing. I was super-impressed with the Welsh coast path. And in Scotland it is magnificent — as long as you respect the use of the land there you are treated as an adult with common sense.... [T]here’s something about long-distance walking in Britain that’s so peaceful and so varied. Every day is very, very different. That’s especially the thrill of coastal walking. You can walk through a city and then just a few hours later you’re on a wild cliff. It changes all the time.'"

From "King Charles coastal path to open all 2,700 miles for walking in England/Providing right of access to the entire coast for the first time, it will be the longest of its kind in the world" (London Times).

Wales.

There's nothing wrong with William supporting England, he was born in England, he's English, it's right he supports them.

What's wrong is that he's been given the title Prince of Wales. https://t.co/CR32FWP8X8

— Julie Jones (@Ms_JulieJ) November 15, 2022

"Morris lived for many years with her gravestone standing in the corner of her library, the ne plus ultra of memento moris."

"She was an inveterate traveler but also prized her house in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy; she wrote often about its snuggly, hyggelig qualities. Death for her may be something akin to merely being in, to borrow the words of the novelist Joshua Cohen, a bed with a lid. 'I am attracted to decline, to the melancholy spectacle of things that get old and die,' Morris told Leo Lerman in a Paris Review interview. She also joked that when she departed, the headlines would read, 'Sex Change Author Dies.' Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on Oct. 2, 1926, in Somerset, England. From 1964, when she began taking hormone pills, to 1972, when she had the surgery, she transitioned to female from male, a process documented in 'Conundrum' (1974), her critically and commercially successful memoir. She wrote more than 40 books, the bylines nearly evenly divided between James and Jan.... She wrote a fair amount of doddle later in her life; not all of her stuff is worth the investment. (If you can make it through her books on Lincoln and Canada, you are a hardier person than I am.)"

From the obituary by Dwight Garner in the NYT, which distinguishes itself with a headline — "Jan Morris, a Distinctive Guide Who Took Readers Around the World" — that does not say the thing that Morris joked would be the one distinction in the headlines for her obituary. In place of the distinction "transgender," the Times gives Morris the distinction "distinctive." 

I was intrigued by Garner's phrase "the ne plus ultra of memento moris." One's own gravestone is indeed the ne plus ultra of memento moris.

I mulled over whether "ne plus ultra" and "memento moris" should be italicized as foreign language words and looked them up in the OED. 

"Ne plus ultra" — the furthest attainable point or peak of perfection — has been in use in English since the 1600s. A restoration era play has the line "Now Madam, you have seen the ne plus ultra of Art."

"Memento mori" has the distinction of appearing first in a work of William Shakespeare: 

Bardolph: Why, Sir John, my face does you no harm.  

Falstaff: No, I’ll be sworn; I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a death’s head, or a memento mori. I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire and Dives that lived in purple – for there he is in his robes, burning, burning’. (Henry IV, Part 1 3.3. 24 – 28)

Falstaff makes good use of Bardolph's face. It looks like the face of a man burning in Hell and thus serves as a memento mori, a sobering reminder of death.

ADDED: I was fascinated by this quote from Morris: "What I can’t stand is being patronized by men.... Treated as a second-class citizen. Just because I’m a woman, there are people now who think I haven’t got a mind any more. Sometimes even those who’ve known me before." Presumably, "before" refers to the various treatments she received, including hormone therapy. Did the hormones change how she wrote? "She wrote a fair amount of doddle later in her life," the author of the obituary opines, and I imagine that sounded okay to write because the decline seems to have to do with age and not the hormone therapy. It's politically incorrect even to ask the question whether the female hormones had a negative effect on the writing. 

"Stop! Are you aware that you have crossed into Welsh TikTok?"

If you're like me you will watch a few dozen of these.

"The government of Wales has a question for parents: Is it ever right to physically punish your children?"

"It began a 12-week consultation on the issue on Tuesday, with officials saying they hoped to join more than 50 countries that have adopted an outright ban on the practice.... Some opposition to a ban has already gathered. A group called Be Reasonable, named after an exemption in current assault laws for 'reasonable punishment' of children by parents, says it has more than 1,500 names on a petition against the proposal, in a nation of a little over 3 million people. 'A little gentle slap here and there is just a part of teaching discipline,' a Be Reasonable campaigner, Angie Robins, a mother of three from Newport, in southeast Wales, said in a telephone interview. 'It never did anyone any harm.'"

The NYT reports.

Speaking of punishment, what's the punishment for violating the proposed ban?

Is there really a problem with smacking children in Wales that requires a specific rule on this subject? And what will be the unintended consequences? Surely, some parents will slip and smack their kids reflexively over various infractions. Are you going to take children away from their parents for that? Put the parents in jail? That's going to hurt children too.

But apparently there are 50 countries that have already taken this step, and presumably, Wales feels pressure not to look like a laggard in the enlightened respect for children. But you don't have to just go along with the crowd. You can think for yourself and make better, subtler judgments. That's what good parents teach their children.

Whatever happened to Primo Communist Flitworth?

I'm reading Simon Winchester's "The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible," the part about Robert Owen, born in Wales in 1771, who came to America with ideas of utopian socialism he'd developed in Scotland. He met "with President Monroe, took tea with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and gave two public lectures in the Capitol. John Quincy Adams, the president-elect, came to both talks, and was so taken that he had Owen build a scale model of his proposed New Harmony building and display it at the White House." New Harmony failed:

As is so often the way with utopias, factions developed — no fewer than ten had formed within just two years of Owen’s arrival, and all began bickering, squabbling, and arguing for various rewritings of the commune rules, each splinter group jostling for ideological supremacy. In the end, a demoralized and disillusioned Owen, shocked at a brand of waywardness he had never experienced back home among the Scots, returned to Britain. His confidence was sorely shaken: his ideas for the universal betterment of the working classes began slowly to evaporate, and he became steadily ever more marginalized and ridiculed a figure.

That paragraph ends with a footnote, and it is in that footnote where we encounter the most perfectly silly name I have ever seen:

Robert Owen’s final grand gesture was the creation of an immense and ruinously expensive cooperative community in Hampshire called Queenswood, in which seven hundred people lived, their inner quadrangle illuminated by “koniophostic light,” with conveyor belts bringing food from central kitchens to their dining halls. Couples moved in. A first baby born at Queenswood was formally named Primo Communist Flitworth. But the community never really prospered and closed after only a short while. Owen then changed gear once again and provided valuable help in settling the rival US-Canadian claims to Oregon territory, then tried in vain once more to sell his socialist ideas in Paris, where he died in 1858 and was buried in the grounds of a deconsecrated church.

What happened to Primo Communist Flitworth? Was he not worth a flit? Did he have some informal name that he used and blended into the general populace. He's the 19th century's Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz. Who did he become when he disaggregated himself from the commune that gave him his stigmatizing name? A nobody?

Earth Day.

The Google doodle is charming.

What are you doing for Earth Day?

Me, I'm waking up pre-dawn, making a cup of coffee, and watching the sun rise through the larger window that is my picture window which is partly blocked by the smaller window that is my computer screen, and I'm blogging about the happenstance that what the window to the larger world displays is a story about an oak tree as the window to my smaller world looks out onto an oak tree.



Our oak tree, which I hope will stay upright for many more years, is very old, but nowhere nearly as old as the oldest oak in Wales, which got blown down last Wednesday night:

The oldest oak in Wales – and probably one of the oldest oak trees in northern Europe – has grown in the Ceiriog Valley near Chirk, north Wales, since 802 and measured 12.9m in girth. Legend states that the Welsh prince Owain Gwynedd rallied his army under the tree in 1157, before defeating the English King Henry ll at the nearby battle of Crogen, and that the tree was spared when Henry had his men cut down the Ceiriog woods in 1165.