A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The thirty-third post of a series.

I’ve been reading Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment this week, and the introduction introduced me to the lovely word ‘palimpsest’:

We have written ourselves into the DNA of this planet, laced human history into the very earth. Every environment bears a palimpsest of its past. Every woodland is a memoir made of leaves and microbes that catalogue its ‘ecological memory’. We can learn, if we want, to read it—to observe in the world around us the story of how it came to be.

It looks like it comes from the Latin palimpsēstus which has almost exactly the same meaning as the modern word (a parchment on which the original text has been overwritten by another).

On my walk to work each morning recently, I’ve been passed by a push-bike with a trailer which has “catering for Manchester by bike” written on it. I assume no-one is really cycling 140-miles to cater for Manchester, but then I suppose stranger things have happened.

The public information sign lying that “The Government and NHS are well prepared to deal with this virus” has finally been taken down from the men’s toilet wall at work, two-and-a-half years on. The poster advertising a long-closed staff survey for an employer which previously occupied our office remains.

I feel seen.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “a drawing on parchment of a person cycling past a toilet.” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE 2.