You could consider this an abstract. Or, a sign that I didn’t particularly leave the house today and so was needing to point the camera at something that could be seen from within it. Or that I’m spying on the neighbours again. Either way, that’s been nearly four weeks at home, and 18 of the last 26 photos in Hebden. Time to go somewhere else for a bit.
My counting of different places featured on this blog — see the stats page (and marvel at its anal retentiveness) — is just as personal and subjective as everything else on here. I could, for example, have split up London and the Lake District, designations which cover areas the size of whole counties. Meanwhile, there are at least 50 shots where I’ve been unable to specify a location for one reason or another (like, being taken from aeroplanes, or the back of minibuses after waking up in the middle of nowhere in Tanzania).
However, the fact is that by this ‘official count’, Galashiels yesterday was place number 499, and so this melancholy little harbour (even more morose in the day’s constant drizzle) gives to the town of Tayport, on the other side of the estuary from Dundee, the distinction of becoming number 500. This means nothing at all in the grand scheme of things, but so what.
Queen’s House in Greenwich, London was built by Inigo Jones in the 17th century. As he was rather good at this kind of thing, it turned out to be an architectural masterpiece, bringing classical style to English architecture for the first time. The Great Hall is a perfect cube and this staircase — the first ever built in the country that lacks a central pillar — is just gorgeous. (Although not quite perfect, do you notice? There is a wider step up there forming the landing of the next floor up, and the spiral ‘kinks’ as a result.) Apparently it ‘holds itself up’, meaning that the steps cantilever out from the wall and the weight of each is supported by the one below, and eventually the ground.
It’s a bit of a shame that only a decade or so after the house was finished, the English Civil War meant there was no Queen for a while. By the time the monarchy was restored, they never used it much. But it remains a very nice house. With paintings in it.
Scotland doesn’t just do good rural landscapes, but good urban ones too, particularly Edinburgh. A half-hour stopover in Waverley station on the way home allowed a glimpse of this. For once, I don’t mind the lamppost, it seems to fit in just right, as if the light is responsible for the shadow in the gap below it.
There is little point staying in on a Saturday, particularly not when the weather continues to be very pleasant. But with Hebden Bridge itself a magnet for day trippers I’d rather go somewhere else. Atherton, near Wigan, is accessible from home on a direct train — that’ll do. And they seem rather proud of local lass Keely Hodgkinson, winner of Olympic gold in Paris (800m), but why not be?
Rotherham, South Yorkshire, is one of those places where a high proportion of its casual visitors surely come because it has a League football team and for no other reason. This is not to knock the place. I did have a decent day out here today (at the football) and it certainly has a big and impressive church, as depicted.
This shot breaks plenty of rules, including being taken from inside the café over the road, and my leaving in the lights that surrounded its window. But the woman in the red coat helps. And anyway, I don’t care about the formalities because today I have stretched this blog out far enough to reach day 5,000. 13 years, 8 months and 7 days of daily photography has brought me to this point. I suppose I occasionally think about winding it all up but it hasn’t happened yet, there always seems to be something coming up which encourages me to continue, whether it’s an interesting trip away, or a numerical target like today’s. The next one should be that I ensure I make it to my birthday this year: because on the day I turn 56, I will have documented exactly one-quarter of my life on here. Seems a reasonable (next) goal to me…
As I’m having the week off, a chance to do highbrow things like hang around art galleries with the wife, who wanted to see this exhibition, Women in Revolt, at the Whitworth in Manchester. For this artist, her revolt seemed to consist of working with a camera for the three minutes it took to record the piece, the content of which can be guessed from the title of this post. Munch did it better, but if that’s the way you want to revolt, go for it, I suppose.
In the years I have been doing this blog I have made my way through five cameras, giving an average lifespan, for each, of somewhere between two and three years. The latest came quite close to dying today: a few minutes after I took this picture I thought it had gone, in the same way as they always go, namely the zoom lens freezing up permanently. This would have been a major problem seeing as I am still stuck out in the mid-Atlantic, a few thousand miles from a reasonable camera retailer. However, after putting it in the fridge (literally), it has recovered, for now — but I will be using it sparingly for the rest of my time here. In which case, this is not going to be the very last shot taken with the Leica; but it was close to being.
This is the BBC World Service’s station on Ascension Island — from here, programmes are received, converted and relayed to South America and Africa, including until quite recently the Voice of America, but DOGE put paid to that, and as the manager of the station told me today, who is going to take up the slack? Russia and China, certainly. Thank you so much, MAGA. A fascinating morning in fact, but not an edifying prospect for the future, even if I do know more about global communications technology than I did last night.
As I type this on Thursday morning, my latest journey has ended, and so for the next nine days you will be seeing pictures of a lump of volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This will be a quite different environment from the genteel acres of Oxfordshire, the part of England that I had to transit through to reach my destination, seeing as I was flying out of RAF Brize Norton overnight. That being a military base, they were understandably touchy about deadbeat civilians like me coming in and happily snapping away at their installations for blogging purposes.
Here, instead, is the village of Brize Norton itself: a patch of quintessential Oxfordshire. With that thatched roof, I guess this scene might have looked much the same for two or three hundred years. Except for the one anachronism — it’s there, if you can spot it.
Thirteen and a half years, plus one day, into the life of this blog and it’s nice that I can still sometimes find new things to see that are literally just down the road from my house. This metal construction at the back of the gym has been depicted before from underneath — let’s see if I can find one… ah yes, here you go. But the shadows falling on it this morning — yes! the sun is shining — were rather pleasing.
Being 42 