Driving along roads not taken before, on the lookout for photo opportunities: this was a good one. Huddersfield is apparently Britain’s largest town (as opposed to city), and it looks pretty sizeable from up here.
Eight and a half hours’ work today — almost all spent in online meetings. Even in the depths of lockdown I did not do such a day. These objects marked the limits of my real world. (Yes, that’s a sticker of Graham Chapman’s face stuck to the Macbook.)
Finding myself, once again, in the west Leeds suburbs for an evening, I wandered into this Mexican restaurant for dinner and, as with the other diners, found myself in a training session for a new member of the waiting staff, so things were a little chaotic… But everything came out in good time and tasted fine. So I tipped generously, and tried not to get in the way.
Salt stores were once kept in order to preserve food: a matter of life and death, hundreds of years ago. Nowadays we use them to grit the roads — and not even that much, in this relatively mild winter. But I guess this monumental pile of sodium chloride will last until next year, if needed then.
June 2022 will mark 25 years since I graduated from the University of Leeds, at least for the first time, with my BA (Development Studies with Politics, in case you were wondering). There are now very few people from that time still present in my life on any kind of regular basis, and even they haven’t been seen enough lately, for many reasons, not just the one that is obvious (though it does matter). Doug is one of the few, unseen at all since August 2020 and, on the blog, March 2019 (with this pic, that shows he hasn’t changed much). Great to see him today, though. As we say each time it happens, we should do this kind of thing more often — but will we? That’s up to us, isn’t it.
One wouldn’t think Burnley would be on a direct route from Leeds to Liverpool but the canal bearing that name does take a rather roundabout course. It’s a pastoral spot in a town that doesn’t have a reputation for rural charm. The rule of thirds works well enough on this shot.
Not quite Wordsworth’s multitude but there are certainly a lot of these sprouting outside the Ellen Wilkinson Building on campus at the moment, something the rather random focus point of this shot is intended to capture. This is the 700th Manchester shot to feature on here, by the way.
It’s early in the year to see one of these outside, but here one is, scaling what to it is a substantial crag: actually it’s the capstone of a wall next to a car park. We’re both out and about fairly early, in different ways.
Third shot in a row taken in Manchester, and that’s the first time that has happened since early February 2020. I’m pulling an early one, too. Manchester, in need of some kind of symbol (as everything has to have a ‘brand’ these days), has adopted the bee, and statues like this in a variety of colours crop up at points in the city.
Nearly two years ago today (9/3/20) I was in Manchester and depicting much the same area of the city, albeit from higher up. On the left of this picture, the Town Hall remains swaddled in scaffolding and Prince Albert’s memorial on the right is also still under wraps. Shortly after 9/3/20, the stupidities of lockdown began and there were only three more Manchester pictures for the subsequent five months. None of that this year, thankfully. And if anyone ever tries it again I will ignore them.
Being 42 