This ersatz life continues. Walking is about the only entertainment available — at least, the only one that should be depicted on here. The monument on Stoodley Pike has featured several times on this blog (follow the tag); the houses are the northern end of Heptonstall; and last week’s snow has all gone, for now.
The topography of my home town is such that many of the paths that wind up and down the particularly steep hillsides have never been turned into roads. This one winds up the steep slope of Lee Wood, past the cricket club to the road at the top. I took it today for variety: expect a lot of ‘local’ colour at this time, ‘cos local is all that’s on offer.
Hibernation continues. And it’s cold out there. Although a beautiful day today, in many ways. But I imagine few people in Britain are going to remember January 2021 at all, in the long run.
Cheap this may be, but ths squirrel was virtually posing for the camera, if a little nervously. It was one of the few signs of life on campus today, or even in the whole of Manchester.
Correctly, it is owls that gather together in parliaments. But when do you ever see more than one owl together? The term seems to better fit these pigeons, sat on top of the Big Ben-style clock that graces what used to be a hotel in the centre of Hebden, now it’s apartments. Like all stopped clocks, it gives the right time twice a day.
Still going into Manchester for now, because I need to. The times these shots emerge is a factor of the train I catch — compare this with last Friday’s, taken, well, 10 minutes earlier in the walk. I just like the abstraction of this one. You can’t photograph buildings like that from ground level without losing the parallels somewhere or other, but this looks reasonable.
Less than an hour into the working week and I’m already reaching for these, which is not a good sign. A side effect of screen imprisonment — I doubt I’m not the only one suffering.
We might as well all hibernate, mightn’t we. The apple tree needed pruning, though, and deepest winter is the time to do it, according to those who know. The shot reflects the greyness of the day and the other clouds, the ones that currently separate us from each other. I feel like I’m on an extended break from the rest of humanity.
The white stuff hasn’t featured properly in my life since I was last in Tromsø in April 2018, and there is presently none of it in Hebden Bridge. But it took only a short walk up into the hills to be faced by scenes like this. Contacts in Tromsø also suggest that at the moment, they have none at all, while Spain and Portugal suffer under the worst winter in living memory. This is one of those shots that honestly is not monochrome, though you wouldn’t know it.
A scene I have passed frequently over the last nine and a bit years but never really noticed before; still, that’s one point of the blog, isn’t it. I thought at first there was a real live human in it (something not prevalent in Manchester city centre right now) but in fact its one of the mannequins, or the start of an android takeover, seeing as we’ve made such a mess of it. A nice ‘rule of thirds’ illustration although I didn’t want to lose the red door at the bottom, and yes, the foliage does get in a way just a little bit. This is the earliest post in a day since 21st September.
