Floating building

 

Summer inspires travel, as I was saying in relation to our recent trip to Vilanova i La Geltrú. But I also feel I should mention rising Covid numbers again.

However, some information that might be considered indirectly related to travel is available at the link below, regarding architecture and, more specifically, floating architecture or floating building. You may already know the term, but I think this is well worth a read.  

https://ecofriend.com/10-examples-sustainable-architecture-future.html

Summer holidays

 

 

It isn’t only short trips like our recent ones between Barcelona and Vilanova i La Geltrú. Summer inspires longer trips as well, the kind that may require air travel, which obviously means adding to the world’s large carbon footprint. So thinking about ways to make travelling a part of the sustainable environment, I’ve looked around the web a bit for some ideas. An organisation called Sustainable Travel has information on this topic, including things like staying closer to home, investing in carbon offsets, generally slowing down. Their website is worth a read:

 

https://sustainabletravel.org/how-to-reduce-travel-carbon-footprint/

 

Also, on the theme of airplane travel, the Environmental Defense Fund speaks about the same themes but with a focus primarily on the aviation industry and vacationers. New information (to me, at least) includes the Carbon Offsetting Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. As much as 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions could be kept out of the atmosphere with full implementation of Corsia. The link on this is:

 

https://www.edf.org/climate/aviation

 

Finally, I looked in the direction of architecture. What I found is surprising and I’m going to save it. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long. I hope some good poetry (in the ample sense, whatever your creative activity) comes out of this. Stretch those desires….

  Another view of the sea from Vilanova. We hadn’t seen some of the friends at yesterday’s birthday celebration for a year…. And it was a beautiful reunion, masks off when possible, proper distancing and greeting—and who would have believed we’d be talking this way before the pandemic! However, mild, sunny weather. Light traffic on the highways. All in high spirits. From the restaurant we could look down and see the beach with people running and playing, and colorful parasols here and there on the sands, then the long shallows of the sea, something like in this photo taken some time back (and at a different time of day). This morning, back in the city and ready for a longer trip.

 

 

By the sea.....

 Longing to take a long walk along these shores, which is the plan for today. With the new rise in Covid figures we’re limiting activities of course. We’re permitted to be without masks in the open air inside cities now, but in Barcelona often keep the mask on out of habit. A bad sign? I hope not! In any case for today the sea awaits….

 

Happy Dalloway Day

 

 

 

Celebratory greetings to all.

And happy celebration of the centenary of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s short story collection, Monday or Tuesday. More information on this is available at Paula Maggio’s Blogging Woolf, through this link:

https://bloggingwoolf.org/2021/04/08/celebrating-the-centenary-of-virginia-woolfs-monday-or-tuesday/

 Paula’s site is searchable of course, and has more information about Dalloway Day and a host of other topics.

 On we go!

Lighthouse

 Lighthouse

Wednesday will mark the celebration of the fourth annual Dalloway Day (“the third Wednesday in June.”) And as restrictions due to the Covid 19 pandemic begin to be lifted, we recall that Virginia Woolf, who gave us Mrs Dalloway and so much more, lived through the 1918 influenza pandemic. Indeed, the eponymous character of Woolf’s novel is portrayed as having suffered from that illness.

 However, I have titled this post “Lighthouse” thinking of Woolf’s fourth novel, the book she published two years after Mrs Dalloway. After all, the literary “day” honoring her 1925 novel also honors her fuller achievement, rather as Bloomsday honors more than James Joyce’s Ulysses. And—as many already know—the third Wednesday in June this year happens to fall on the 16^th, the annual date of Bloomsday.

So, definitely, let us continue to celebrate! And as the author of To the Lighthouse notes in the essay “On Re-reading Novels,” recall that,

[o]ur observations [from previous readings] … can now come out and range themselves according to the directions we have received. [….] On a second reading we are able to use our observations from the start, and they are much more precise, but they are still controlled by these moments of understanding.

Haiku

 

Walking in the Pyrenees*

 

hurrying to beat the traffic

we pack the food,

check the house and lock up

 

 

* From  June last year, actually. While we open up

and ease pandemic restrictions we still haven't had

a chance to return farther north than Viladrau. Hope-

fully this month or next will bring new horizons.