Fridays are my teaching days at the moment, not every week (hence my ability to bugger off to the Lakes last Friday) but most of them. And it’s an all day thing. So visual variety is not a characteristic of my average Friday, my apologies. Things kick of at 10: the pre-lecture cup of tea from the cafe in the Bridgeford Street building is an essential preliminary.
The town of Burnley has nearly 75,000 people in it and lies less than a dozen miles from my house, so one might have expected it to have appeared on the blog more than three times in the last seven years — and all three of them (6/4/12, 1/19/12 and 22/11/15) were taken at Turf Moor, the home of Burnley FC. Is there much other reason to go to Burnley? Not if the evidence of my life is anything to go by, but I did find cause to visit today for non-footballing reasons. The garage was nothing to do with it, but I do like the scene, even if there’s not quite the desired symmetry to the shot.
Not actually a third monochrome shot in a row, although it might as well be on a dull, grey November day. Nearly three years after Mytholmroyd (along with much of the rest of the Calder Valley) was sunk beneath more than two metres of water on 26th December 2015, the stable door is finally being bolted — so we have been told — thanks to massive flood defence works. These pile drivers and giant screwdrivers currently occupy half the carriageway of the main road in the village, and at the moment their main effect is to have created a year-long traffic jam along the A646.
Altrincham Street marks one of the edges of the Manchester campus. Officially, it ends just behind where this shot was taken: here, we are looking through a gate that blocks off this extension, squeezing itself through the gap between the car park and the (overcrowded and inadequate) cross-Manchester railway line on the right. Why this shot, and the second monochrome shot in a row? I just like the perspectives. And it’s a kind of non-space, forgotten, unused. In some cities there’d be a whole thriving community down here.
This building was built in 1899 as a Baptist chapel. Worship (and/or baptisms) haven’t taken place here since the 1970s, but it is now a conference centre and youth hostel. As it is only a few minutes’ walk from my house it was nice to work here today rather than in Manchester, but it does lie halfway up a fekkin’ steep hill, which I had to climb three times in the morning. Maybe that’s why the Baptists stopped worshipping here after a while, and moved to the much more conveniently sited Hope Baptist Chapel down in town…
From the late 1950s when the Sputnik was launched my mother-in-law Carol kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings related to the space race. These are fabulous archives, frankly. Many things are interesting — firstly the equal amount of column inches given to Soviet achievements as much as US ones — and the sometimes outrageous sexism (Valentina Tereshkova is described as ‘the first girl in space’ and the male astronauts and cosmonauts do not escape being treated as brainless sex objects either). Why did I choose this shot? Well, I guess I just like the relaxed pose of the chimpanzee. Let’s face it, he did more orbits of the planet than the rest of us have ever managed.
Football, and landscape…. a mix that does for me at the moment, though I hope you’re not getting too tired of it. I liked the wavy hedge and the bijou executive accommodation (well, maybe it’s not that) behind one corner at Slyne with Hest FC of the West Lancashire League. Excellent game too (4-3 to the hosts).
I’m on a three-day weekend (Thursday, Friday, Saturday). I can think of worse places to spend it. In the background: Red Screes, Caudale Moor, Thornthwaite Crag.
This picture needs some explanation. For the second time in a few weeks I visited the Etihad stadium, home of Manchester City, for a football match (there were reasons). While watching City do what they usually do, that is, barely break sweat but win easily, it was easy to be distracted in the first half by the activities of what appeared to be a hawk, or kestrel, that had taken up residence in the roof and kept flying between two of the stands. At one point it clearly dropped something that it was holding in its claws yet still managed to swoop down and catch the prey before it hit the ground (and or landed on someone in row F). I just about managed to capture it here in flight, even if it is not very definable. It may not be all that good a photo but it is still more interesting than the night’s football.
Postscript: As my Facebook friend Margaret pointed out after I posted this, the bird may well have been on professional duty; birds of prey are a good way of keeping the pigeon and other pest population down in a stadium like this.
9am and I’m at the station on the way to work. Whatever this robin’s plans were for the day, he seemed happy enough about it, his song being the soundtrack to the wait for the 09:06. A shame he wasn’t perched in the sunshine but never mind.
