Monday 14th August 2023, 11.30am (day 4,372)
The uneventfulness of today was largely determined by this crap. Really, what’s the point in facing it? It is forecast to improve, so I just got on with stuff indoors.
More glorious summer
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Author Archives: Drew Whitworth
Waiting for “Oppenheimer”
Sunday 13th August 2023, 7.20pm (day 4,371)
Clare, on the right, has her membership card ready for action. The movie, as the title of the post indicates, was Oppenheimer: which is a decent movie, I’ll acknowledge that, but I’ve stopped thinking that any film needs to be three hours long. (Though these three hours were definitely better than the three hours of my life that Beau is Afraid is never giving back.)
Leaving Holyhead station
Saturday 12th August 2023, 11.20am (day 4,370)
Holyhead railway station is one of those that is definitively The End Of The Line. A terminus, a cul-de-sac, all change please. You get off into a tangle of docks and railway lines and have to depend on this bridge to take you over all this and into the town. I like this shot as (unlike yesterday) it was one of those that has turned out exactly as I hoped when I pressed the shutter.
In Nightjar’s window
Friday 11th August 2023, 4.05pm (day 4,369)
He was inside Nightjar. I was outside, enjoying the first beer of the weekend (and also wondering whether it was about to rain). I didn’t mean to get myself into the shot as a reflection, but once I saw that I had, I decided it might be saying something about me seeing into the future…. if you get the point.
It did rain, by the way. But only a little.
Bookworm
Thursday 10th August 2023, 1.45pm (day 4,368)
The second picture of the inside of a book in four days, but I am doing a lot of reading at the moment. Anyway, this wasn’t a work book, as the text might indicate — in fact this is an old Doctor Who novel, which I have probably owned for about forty-five years. At some point, it has been merrily munched through, round and round and round again, by some minuscule thing with teeth, making this the first definitive case of bookworm I think I’ve ever seen. At least it didn’t spread, but I won’t be selling this volume on the second-hand market, I feel.
Out foraging
Wednesday 9th August 2023, 2.25pm (day 4,367)
The insect was after the nectar. The flower wants its pollen moving on. I wanted the blackberries, the seeds of which will in turn be distributed. We all get something out of the transaction.
Bus crash — aftermath
Tuesday 8th August 2023, 4.50pm (day 4,366)
Walking through Manchester city centre tonight it was impossible to not notice the activity around the corner of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street, with everything cordoned off by police tape and some major sweeping up under way. Turns out at lunchtime a bus took out a central reservation, for some reason (which I can quite believe involved swerving to save the life of some idiotic cyclopath of the kind who thinks his Deliveroo bag gives him the right to ignore red lights), a few people hurt but nothing serious. And the picture? Well, the pink scaffolding is impressive. Some might say there’s not been enough pink on the blog recently.
Cancelled
Monday 7th August 2023, 1.50pm (day 4,365)
I am occasionally still known to consult that nowadays esoteric and slightly old-fashioned source of information, the ‘book from the library’. This whole date-stamping and cancelling thing seems quite archaic now, doesn’t it? But in 2006 it was still all the rage.
World’s Oldest Football Ground
Sunday 6th August 2023, 3.10pm (day 4,364)
One to add to the ‘superlatives’ at the bottom of the stats page, the next time I update it. Hallam FC have been around, as the stand says, since 1860, and have always played here, at Sandygate, in the west of Sheffield. According to the Guinness Book of Records, this makes this place the oldest football ground in the world. Hallam are the second-oldest club, after Sheffield FC: I guess it made sense to start no. 2 fairly near to no. 1, after all, they needed someone to play. (What the third-oldest club — Cray Wanderers, from Kent — did at first with their playing time is not as yet recorded.)
The Humber Bridge, from North Ferriby
Saturday 5th August 2023, 1.15pm (day 4,363)
Back on November 4th 2020 I stood under the south end of the Humber Bridge — the right-hand end as this picture shows it — and took this shot. It was a day of considerably nicer weather than today, despite this being August. Anyway, this gigantic construction can join the Forth Bridge and Tay Bridge as great bridges to have appeared twice. I believe that this one is so long that the two stanchions are slightly out of parallel with each other, to allow for the curvature of the Earth, and I wonder whether you might even be able to see that on this shot, though probably that’s my imagination.
Being 42 