Actually there were participants from a few different countries here today but the core was Bangladeshi. I’ve finished my part of the webinar — that’s my icon on the right of the set (a picture that is nearly nine years old now, as in it I’m wearing my eclipse glasses). My colleague Martyn is about to get going in my stead, and who doesn’t love a Dr Strangelove reference?
This is definitely liquid nitrogen (or was, until a second or two previously), as it’s going into the Air Liquide tank next to the Engineering building. All sorts of things might be going on in there, with applications for liquid nitrogen ranging from the preservation of human remains through the digging of tunnels to the making of ice cream. As uni doesn’t have a cookery department, though, it’s probably not the last one. I can’t discount the first.
OK, so it’s only the Macron Cup, the league cup for the teams in the North West Counties League (situated at the 9th and 10th levels of English football): but after beating West Didsbury and Chorlton 3-1 at Accrington Stanley’s ground this afternoon, AFC Liverpool have won more trophies this season than their senior city cousins are going to. So some celebration is well deserved.
In evolutionary terms ferns are much older than grasses, I believe. There is something primordial about them, a beauty to them as they uncurl, though also something disquieting too. I can quite picture one of these as the model for the creature that bursts out of Kane’s stomach in Alien, though of course that was the genius of H R Giger, who designed it, all based around these natural forms.
Opened in 1849, the High Level Bridge over the River Tyne in Newcastle was the world’s first ever combined road-rail bridge, and is still used as such, just about: up above, suburban trains still trundle regularly but the roadway below is now for buses and taxis only, and only allows north-to-south (Newcastle to Gateshead) travel. But we can still walk it both ways, and doing so was a fairly interesting way of passing 20 minutes of time.
Going on the gig posters that still sit, forlornly, behind a metal screen just to the right of this shot, the Retro Bar, on the corner of Sackville and Charles Streets in Manchester, closed in summer 2025. The reason? Because there are no longer any students up at this end of the campus. Whatever is being planned for the acreage of the old UMIST buildings, it has involved gradually emptying them over the last decade or so, and accumulating what must amount to real estate value of tens, perhaps even hundreds, of millions of pounds. I’m sure my employer is well aware of this.
Meanwhile — it was loud and peaceful, so Mark attests. Note the train heading over the viaduct.
Clare really dislikes Apocalypse Now and I have given up trying to establish why this is. It’s not that she has anything against the genre, as she agrees Full Metal Jacket is a classic, for instance. But she was out all evening….
On the other hand, having sat through the Coppola Cut for the second time, unlike with some movies (particularly The Wicker Man which was butchered in the initial edit) this one doesn’t benefit all that much from the additional material. All it really adds is forty minutes and three pairs of breasts. Nevertheless if you ask me (but not Clare) this remains a work of crazed brilliance.
The houses on Windsor Road in Hebden Bridge always make a good subject and I think this is the sixth time they have appeared on here by now — but it’s been fifteen years, so I ask for that to be taken into consideration when judging my claim to want to avoid repeition on here. Definitely an effective illustration of certain engineering principles though, and of variations on a theme . I make it that there are forty windows visible on this shot in whole or in part, all the same, but all just that little bit different too.
At some point in the future — and it may be next week, next year or whatever — there will come a day on which, at the end of it, I will be forced to admit to myself that I have taken no photos worth publishing. Today was nearly that day. Blue plastic seats (specifically at the West Riding County FA headquarters, on the edge of Leeds) won’t raise it for most people, artistically or spiritually. And even if there’s a certain interest in the repetitive pattern my shadow spoils the composition.
But enough apologies! Look, the numbers are in a random order. Which is why I took the shot in the first place, I suppose…
Professor Ernest Rutherford, originally from New Zealand, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1908 even before he conducted, with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, the famous experiment where a bunch of alpha particles were fired at a sheet of gold and some of them bounced back, which Rutherford allegedly said was like firing a missile at a sheet of tissue paper and having it come back and hit you. From this was established the existence of the atomic nucleus, not to mention the original Geiger counter. For this reason Prof Rutherford is one of those former ‘Employees of the Month’ that the University of Manchester likes to big up. But in this case, why not? (Incidentally the room in which this experiment took place is still there, although no longer a laboratory — last time I looked it could be booked as a meeting room.)
Being 42 