A day early too. We all need a break — me, him and indeed the trains, which stop running into Manchester for the next 10 days, just for the hell of it really. Who cares: I’m now off work until the 4th April. Happy Easter.
The Barbican estate is home to about 4,000 people and is a huge complex in the City of London. When it was finished in the 1970s it was often decried as a brutalist architectural monstrosity. Actually I kind of liked it, I bet it’s a pretty decent place to live, with a lake and garden within its walls and generally a rather peaceful feel. Something tells me the guy seen here has been there for a lot of the last forty years.
Why do I keep taking photos of this building (see also here and here, to identify but two others)? Because I like it, it is fine architecture and great public space.
I’m sure this is a sign of the decay of Western civilisation or whatever, but hey, at least we’re all around the same table at the same time.
Early picture today — in fact, the earliest true morning picture since 5th August last year (in Tanzania).
With a determination not to repeat myself on this blog, if one had extended the timeline long enough into the future then I guess it was inevitable urinals would appear on here at some point. But with these being rather pretty ones, hey, here they are today. These are installed at a garden centre, if you’re wondering what the point is.
Joe’s great-grandmother — Clare’s gran, Alma Draper — is 90 today; happy birthday to her. That’s a lot of life. We attended the celebrations in Morecambe today. This picture shows them both standing up, incidentally — Joe is getting much taller, and Gran, well, she’s never been particularly tall.
I don’t often do shots of working life, usually because it’s neither very interesting, nor very appropriate to stick cameras in the face of people I’m working with. But today should be a work shot, to mark the end of a bloody busy week. And I get away with it today and I like it because though both these people, Liz and Doug, have played a relatively significant role in my life over the last whatever years they have never met before today. Doug’s second appearance on the blog (after this one), Liz’s first.
Despite an early chill today was a very pleasant day in Manchester, as they’ve all been this week. I’m calling it spring — feels like it’s here to me. This is another street scene, I know I do a lot of them but hey, I do work for a living, and being sat in an office all day is not going to give the same opportunities as my morning walk through the city. Who knows, maybe soon I will be able to picture it without roadworks. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Another pleasant, sunny afternoon, although a chilly one. I know this shot would be better without the signs, but hey, that’s the clutter of modern life for you.
It’s been a VERY uneventful few days. At least this guy gave me something unusual to depict; the Boxing Day floods have provoked some vague dredging of the Hebden Water. Dredging is fine, but it just pushes the flooding downstream; what one really needs is attention to how fast the rainwater falls off the watershed, prompting (ideally) the planting of trees and the development of other facilities that keep the water uphill rather than pushing it down the valleys, only that doesn’t meet the needs of rich landowners.
