The drive home — with a walk on the way, to the summit of Broad Law, the highest point in the Scottish Borders at 2,760 feet. There was not a great deal to see on the way up, but the top is graced by this construction, a VOR beacon (that is, Very high frequency Omnidirectional Range — so now you know). Should every mountain have one? Well, probably not, but this one does.
Who knows how long The Child will stay in Dundee but for now the place is coming to feel familiar enough. I have developed a habit of ascending Dundee Law each time I come to the city. The view is excellent and the massive memorial on the summit certainly does its job. Making it up to the top from Joe’s flat, without a break, has become a good marker of whether I’m still fit enough for satisfaction.
This collage, featuring the Graphene Institute on the left, indicates quite clearly why I and much of the rest of Manchester city centre got very wet about twenty minutes later. But, yes, I had packed an umbrella, fortunately.
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.
More use of other people’s art, but Swindon, where I stayed after yesterday’s walk, seems to have quite a lot of it and much of it is pretty good. Better than covering these hoardings with advertising anyway. I have noticed in Manchester that there is a mural which is simultaneously an advert, however: corporate public art in other words…. Let us hope this trend is generally resisted.
The Uffington White Horse is 360 feet long (110m if you insist) and may be over 3,000 years old. Most of the hill figures carved into the chalk downlands of southern and eastern England are modern imitations but this is the real aboriginal deal. Like most art, it’s designed to be seen straight on, not at some oblique angle from just above its top right-hand corner. But it’s still mighty impressive. Whomever it was first dreamt this up and then managed to organise its production — I say, good for them.
For more pictures from today’s walk see my other blog.
Surely the title of this post is self-explanatory. I love it. I just wish I could remember exactly where I took this picture: it is somewhere on either Howland St or New Cavendish St, somewhere very close to the BT Tower. But I cannot find it on Google Street View (last updated in that area in about 2021) which suggests it has only been there for a couple of years. Great effect, though: and presumably functional in some form or other. Going on the way all the pipes run into it I assume this is the air-con, or possibly the pillar of the structural integrity of the superframe, or something.
I have no problem using other people’s art to pep up the blog and this is remarkably good. Apparently, with a pair of 3-D glasses on, it comes out even better. So effective is it that I resisted the temptation to post something from this afternoon’s football match, although Rochdale 2 Morecambe 4 was such an unexpected and pleasing result that the temptation was a strong one, I must admit.
This memorial consists of 2,711 stone slabs — officially ‘stelae’ — of varying height arrayed across an acre of ground near the Brandenburg Gate: more land formerly occupied by a part of the Berlin Wall, in fact. For more, see this page. That’s three pictures out of four that highlight a less favourable element of this country’s history but at least they seem to be prepared to remember in public.
For the second time in a week Bradford proves a decent choice for an evening out, even if it was a little wet, and the city can continue to ascend the rankings of Most Depicted Places on the blog, a list on which it now rises to 9th (see the stats). It is one of those northern towns which celebrated its Victorian wealth, here based on wool, by building a magnificent municipal headquarters of the kind no local authority or government would dare to risk now, for fear of being slagged off for misuse of public funds. But why not do it this way? Works for me.
Being 42 