The students are back — fortunately — and campus was busy today. All the same I want to epitomise the day with this unpeopled shot. If even recycling bins, and yellow warning signs, can look pretty, then you know the light is something special.
There have been a few of these down the years. If the owner — or the parent of the owner — wants to retrieve it, it’s up in Nutclough Woods, near the water race. Though it’s always puzzled me how someone can just lose one boot or shoe, at least, when one is out and about.
Asserting the “Right to Repair” electronic items is in the news (at least, the sort of news that I read); but largely it’s still cheaper to buy another one. We call places like this “recycling centres” these days but one has to wonder just how many of these items do, in the end, get reused.
Is it too early to be in the pub on a Saturday afternoon? When the weather outside is as grim as it was today, then no. The welcome inside was much warmer.
The endless building and rebuilding of Manchester does not seem to have particularly slowed down as a result of the last two years of bollocks, although seeing as no one has any money any more except Mark Zuckerberg it seems, I don’t know who’s going to inhabit all these new buildings. This scaffold tunnel rises over my walking route to work and I’ve been passing through it in both directions for some months, thinking it would make a decent picture; this evening it gets its chance.
The guys give it the “mean and moody, but still cute” look, as if they are modelling for the blackbird version of a Hugo Boss ad. A shame this one is a little out of focus, but I couldn’t persuade them to repeat the pose, sorry.
It’s 2/2/22, and also Lunar New Year (or Chinese New Year, Tet, whatever other term you want to use). It seemed appropriate to depict this today even if I suspect I am a day late. Manchester has a large Chinese population (students or otherwise) and the city centre is decorated accordingly. I believe I should say at this point: xīn nián kuài lè .
Serious combat in the Railway this evening. Somehow black and white photography seems appropriate for this subject matter.
Communicating by carving a message into a tree is known as ‘blazing’ — something I only found out immediately before posting this, thanks to the ever-fascinating Wikipedia. The most famous blazed tree is probably one in Queensland, where a message was left in 1861 for a party of explorers that was never found. I doubt this one, on the path from Hebden Bridge to Mytholmroyd, is as significant in historical terms, but obviously it meant something to someone at the time. And, thanks to this post, to me too, here and now.
This trip down to London also offered the chance to pick up a County Top (see the other blog); specifically Bushey Heath, the highest point in the historic county of Middlesex, swallowed up by London in 1965 although at least it still retains a county cricket team. It wasn’t major mountaineering, though. Clare here strolls through the woods near Bentley Priory (an ecclesiastical relic? no, a premium housing estate) in one of those shots that chews up the bandwidth thanks to all the foliage.
Being 42 