Today was the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day. But seeing as I’ve been north of the Arctic Circle since Saturday morning this was a regression, in daylight terms. No problem with that however. The 24-hour daylight was nice in some ways but it could become monotonous after a while. Shot taken from above Manchester on the final flight home: the city centre is just visible down there in the haze.
In this ongoing image-based narrative of my life I feel like occasionally showing that I earn my right to come to all these nice places, so here’s a picture taken at the staff development workshop I helped run today at UiT (the Arctic University of Tromsø, and there’s a cool name for an educational institution). I think I managed to provoke these people to get thinking…. which is what I do for a living, in the end.
Tromsø is not on the mainland but on the island of Tromsøya: this is its eastern shore. Proof that the Arctic is not all glamorous and dramatic landscapes. This is kind of how I imagine places like Murmansk to look. And I swear I haven’t fiddled with the colours on this one — life really was this monochrome at 4.50pm today, under the pissing rain.
A return to Tromsø after my first visit in March. Well above the Arctic Circle, I will comfortably see no darkness for the next few days. Expect a photo of the Midnight Sun at some point. But not tonight — the views from the final stages of the flight were too good. So I probably saw more snow than you did today, at least from a distance.
Have been a Mac owner for nigh on a decade now but realised today I had never before seen inside one — this realisation coming about when my student Mansour turned up in my office and started dismantling his, for reasons that are too unnecessarily complex to reveal here. Anyway, there you go, that’s what it looks like inside. I somehow feel there should be more to it.
Visited the BBC site today at Salford Quays for a meeting — which was less glamorous than it may sound. Quay House is graced by a whole six-floor-high wall of these little work pods, which are kind of cute.
Often good for a photo, as the canal dry dock is about the last bastion of proper industry (you know, with sparks and grime) in the very centre of Hebden Bridge. It looks old, but was actually put in fairly recently, as I’ve seen photos from the 1980s that show it wasn’t there then.
Second photo in a row of a wall, in effect, though this one made of bricks and mortar rather than rusting corrugated iron. Should the overflow pipe be pouring out near what appear to be a bunch of electrical cables? Probably not, but hey, it ain’t my house.
Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd, though considered by some authorities (e.g. the post office) to be the same place, are separated by a clear half-mile or so of space in which there are no houses or buildings on the main road or the path/lane that goes through the woods and along the river bank, the latter being my favoured way to walk between the two. And on that path, it is this rusting, graffiti-covered but still mostly intact cargo container stood in the woods that, for me, represents the moment at which I arrive in Mytholmroyd (though after that it’s still a good fifteen minutes’ walk to get to, say, Joe’s school, which is where I was heading today). It’s been close to getting on the blog for some time now — let’s finally feature it. I like the ‘smiley face’ in the rust to top right.
