I am in the final stages of writing the first draft of my book and literally did not leave the house all day. With rain most of the day and flat light, opportunities were very slim. But in the end, the atmosphere obliged with a cloudscape.
What makes this post somewhat exceptional in the general scheme of things is not so much its aesthetics but the time of its taking. I mean…. on a Sunday? And this place was packed at that time. We’d gone down to offload a bunch of Joe’s old toys, but nearly couldn’t get a plot despite getting up at 4.45am and arriving there an hour later at most. And at 6am people were turning up demanding to know whether we had any PS3 games. Blimey. Free-market capitalism, eh. I guess it works at this local scale.
The new Championship season kicked off. for me, Joe and about 33,400 other people, at Elland Road this afternoon. I enjoyed the first 15 minutes or so.
L. S. Lowry painted a famous picture in the 1930s called ‘Going to the Match’, showing people flocking to Bolton Wanderers’ ground amid a sea of cobbles, factories and back-to-back housing. There aren’t many grounds left where you can still get that kind of vibe 80 years later, but Elland Road is one of them.
It’s Friday. It’s another ‘dog in the pub’ shot. Here is Ellie, a (I think) border collie/doberman cross. A few months old, terribly cute, on her first season, not quite sure about the attention she’s receiving… I like the posterising effect on this shot and the fact that the shoe of Simon, her owner, has snuck into the background.
Yes, those are my teeth. Goddammit.
It’s been raining again. Perhaps it’s not a blip, maybe that’s the end of the whole hot weather thing. Still, we’ve all got to get out of the house when we can. You didn’t want a photo of my laptop now, did you.
If I’m to keep this blog going, and non-repetitive, I will have to keep finding new slants on the familiar territory of my home town. Particularly at the moment, where I am spending days on end just sat in my office at home, writing the first draft of the book. So here we go, one of the town’s stranger buildings I think. For some reason this shot looks like it might be taken in the USA, the architecture just has that look to it, I can almost see old trams running down the street too (as they used to, a century ago). Here, for once, I don’t think the phone wires detract from the shot.
I have been trying to prevent repetition on this blog but today cannot avoid it. After a fairly ordinary day, a terrific rainstorm makes yesterday’s picture seem like a portent. Showing how well they have learned the lessons since last year’s flooding, blocked drains and manic car drivers turn a heavy, but otherwise manageable thunderstorm into a near-flooding. Poor drainage has hit the cellar of the Railway again and yet it’s all so bloody avoidable.
Back from the red brick of Crowborough, built on its clay soils, to the light brown stone of Hebden Bridge, built on its millstone grit. But the weather was more or less the same – unsettled, rumbly, turbulent. Not a bad shot but shame about the telephone wire. And the time on the clock is fiction — this is a notoriously inaccurate timepiece.
And so, after one more morning of definite, but rather vague and low-level, looking back — it’s probably some mid-life crisis or something — we all left my old stamping ground for points more northern and, to tell the honest truth, far more interesting. It’s been nice to go back, confirm the continuing existence of places remembered, but there’s no need to come back again.
