Tuesday 8th January 2019, 10.40am (day 2,693)
It’s an attractive view, for sure, but I’m seeing it quite a lot lately. I feel a little hemmed in… I need to move around more. The weather forecast is good tomorrow though — time for a walk.
It’s an attractive view, for sure, but I’m seeing it quite a lot lately. I feel a little hemmed in… I need to move around more. The weather forecast is good tomorrow though — time for a walk.
Campus is nice when it’s like this, and there’s no one about. Doubtless this photo and the general level of lassitude around Manchester at the moment will be taken by neoliberals as evidence of our heroic lack of efficiency blah blah, but it’s at times like this that you actually get the work done.
The start of a journey home on a Sunday afternoon. A good day out: but I like this picture just because of the melancholy feel to it, because it’s a melancholy time of year, isn’t it. And the yellow.
A Saturday without a football match to go to. How odd. Instead I paid a visit (amongst other things) to the wife’s treatment room down in town. The tools for Lego therapy are all there awaiting the end of the post-Christmas hiatus. What is Lego therapy? Art therapy — but with Lego. It works… so I’m led to understand.
Back into Manchester for work-related reasons for the first time since 18th December. The Christmas holidays are over for us all. These pigeons ponder the possibility of a dip in the fountains of Piccadilly Gardens, but understandably refuse — it was a chilly day, winter has its bite back to some extent.
According to my phone pedometer: number of steps done yesterday = 38,855. Number done today = 839. This is an accurate reflection of things.
If you think I was staying in and working on a day like this — you obviously don’t know me very well. This picture is taken from around 3,000 feet up, on Skiddaw, fourth-highest mountain in England, yet with almost no wind today it wasn’t even particularly cold. A glorious day: can the rest of 2019 be like this please?
One reason I didn’t go out yesterday was because there’s always today. Start as you mean to go on? Perhaps. Happy New Year.
So how do I feel at the end of 2018? Well speaking personally it’s not been a bad year but then again nothing has really been achieved in my life; jobs and projects both work and personal have just been going on all year without reaching any real resolution. But I did have a couple of very nice summer holidays in August (Channel Islands, Berlin). My favourite photo of the year? This one from the football at Flint on January 27th did get used in the Flintshire Chronicle the following Monday (Headline: “Pride in Defeat for Heartbroken Flint”) and was a real right-place-right-time moment; it also epitomises my year’s non-league footie habit. So I’m going with that one.
And today’s shot? It’s been a while (2015 to be precise) since I could raise it to go out on the evening of 31st December, so there wasn’t much to depict. But feel free to compare this with the shot remaining on the “About” page, showing me on day 1, 26/8/11, and evaluate what the passage of 2,685 days has done to yr. humble blogger. Wherever you are and whatever you might be doing in 2019, Happy New Year.
OK, it’s Manchester, not New York… But it is The Producers. So it’s Broadway really. All together now… “Springtime…”
No one, for once, told me I couldn’t take photos during the performance so I got a couple. I’m quite pleased with this one, which is one of the few photos from which I have not cropped even a pixel; and considering the symmetry that’s worth noting.