The place of rescue — a skip, it seems, destined for landfill. The rescuer: Dex, that’s him behind sporting the P hat. The ultimate fate of this bear? No idea. It will probably never be seen again. The red-eye effect makes me wonder if, in fact, this is some heavily-disguised surveillance camera.
It’s a stock local shot, from a stock local walk, but all the same, there are worse things to do on the last Sunday of the summer than to trundle out in the direction of Stoodley Pike. Not that I actually climbed up to the monument itself today, but it doesn’t photograph any better there than it does from below.
The camera I used today, and will be using for at least a little while, is so old it virtually counts as an antique, this is kind of an experimental archaeology, the deliberate use of outmoded techniques and equipment so we can learn about how our ancestors did it. Well, maybe not quite that old (after all, I still have an old Kodak Brownie kicking around somewhere) but it’s certainly a step back. But it still works, and that’s a major bonus right now.
As for the photo: I did come to officially support the home team today, Bradford Park Avenue. mainly because (for various petty and tribal reasons) I don’t like the away team. Lancaster City — and it is pleasing to report a 1-0 victory for them in the FA Cup. Up the Avenue indeed. Before World War One they were in the top league of England, though not at their present stadium.
With the current main camera definitely out of action unless and until I can source a replacement battery, it was time to dig around in the deepest corners of the house for a possible replacement — and old pieces of kit, twenty, twenty-five years old maybe, kept turning up. Whether any of these, and their respective batteries, actually work or not remains to be established, though the silver one to the right is looking like the best bet. I am going to buy a new one (and I mean a new one, not second-hand again) but that will have to wait until payday.
Back hone. And here was the weather: a dozen of these seemed to sweep through the valley today. What the hell, I had to go back to work.
The roof is immediately recognisable for, yet again, I am at King’s Cross station for the final leg of a journey home. Still, as railway stations go, it’s decent enough, and infinitely better than Euston, down the road. That really is it for the holidays however. Quite a number of fellow passengers on the 10.30 train were obviously international students making their way north.
Well, that’s the end of my trilogy of summer holidays (Tromsø, Bristol, Luxembourg): nicely indulgent but it’s back to work tomorrow. These little statuettes were a feature of our apartment and seem to sum up the feelings, though I accept that it is unreasonable to complain, as such.
As seen on one side of the Eglise St. Jean-de-Grund, from atop one of Luxembourg’s dizzying verticals; specifically, the Rocher du Bock.
No further comment on the image itself, but I must note that something happened today which has been threatened before but never quite happened over the previous 5,499 days of this blog. Namely that I had a total camera breakdown thanks to a completely dead battery — which I could not replace today because it’s basically too old and the shop I tried did not stock it. It will therefore be out of action at least until I get home, although the kit needed replacing anyway (the camera I am presently using was always just stop-gap equipment). It’s just as well that phones take pictures these days, otherwise the blog would have ended today — and expect at least the next couple to be taken with my Google Pixel 6, itself getting a little knackered these days. Hi-tech photography this is not.
“The Family of Man” is a famous photography exhibition featuring more than 500 prints that was first shown in New York in 1955 and toured the world. It is now preserved in Luxembourg because it is the birthplace of the original curator, Edward Steichen and resides in Clervaux Castle in the north of the country (which is not all that far from the capital in the south of the country, this not being a very big place). Well worth a visit, and I am being a little mean to Joe here by using a picture of him yawning: he wants me to note that this is unrepresentative of his actual reaction.
While this view is a bit “picture postcard” it would have been unreasonable not to include such a shot from this stay, for Luxembourg is a very attractive and dramatically-sited city, built around two deep gorges carved into sandstone plateaus. Pictorially, it certainly works.
Being 42 