Three weeks remain until I take my summer holiday, and there’s still plenty of work to do. Martin visited today as I have been a research subject for his project on pedestrian behaviour, which is far more interesting than it sounds. A mundane shot, but a mundane day.
My home town would definitely be a worse place without the Hebden Bridge Picture House which has miraculously remained alive throughout the last few decades and thus neither become a Wetherspoons nor a faceless corporate Vue-style operation with no leg room and supplying shit hot-dogs that cost a fiver. Long may it reign. Although it is nevertheless true that the movie we went to see tonight was pretty cruddy (Hereditary – not as good as reputed….).
All human life is here. If the first set of urinals could make it onto the blog, so can these.
Clare does Lego, so for the second time, we visited Bricktastic where there were many examples of the art of building just about anything with small plastic bricks (and many other components). The machines that, via a variety of means, transported hundreds of balls round and round the room were works of pointless genius. Moving parts and low lights meant I had to use a flash to capture them hence the hopeless over-exposure of this shot, but so it goes sometimes.
Day 2,500 of this blog — six years, ten months and three days, as it happens (give or take a couple of February 29ths). With this being an otherwise mundane day I kept my eye out for occurrences of the figure 2,500 and saw none at all, but there were a couple of £2.50 moments, like this one, which I considered near enough. I also admire this café for printing out all their menus — and laminating them — with a blatant spelling mistake on each: it’s there at the top.
Will there be 2,500 more days? I guess I’m keeping going, for now, though there won’t be a great deal happening over the next few weeks at least. Day 3,000 will come some time in late October 2019 I reckon: which doesn’t seem so far away.
My week’s work is done — time for the weekend, which started when Clare arrived to join me in London in the afternoon and I took her to see this exhibition in the Barbican. I saw one of the world’s most famous photos today — Migrant Mother — you’ll know it when you see it. But we weren’t allowed to take photos of that nor the other photos from Dorothea Lange who documented the Great Depression in the USA and the internment of Japanese-Americans in WW2, many photos from these collections were shown today and very interesting it was too.
It is of course impossible to produce a decent photo of people who are moving, in club lighting, with my crappy camera, without using a flash.
But one can try, dammit. One can try.
With the closure of the Contact Theatre cafe, adjacent to my office, for all of 2018, Café Muse (at the Manchester Museum) has become the nicest place nearby to buy a lunch. I like this back room, with its tiles and incongruous porthole-style windows. A cool spot to hang out as the tropical weather continues.
Today was even more uneventful than yesterday, but I have been doing stuff, starting by sorting out all my season’s football programmes. There are some games missing here, either because there was no programme available or I lost or didn’t buy one, but the 31 in view here give a nice cultural cross-section of my movements over the last 11 months despite the lack of any real photographic quality. Although it will always bug me that I got the Leeds and Hassocks ones the wrong way round.
While you were all, I’m sure, having an exciting holiday weekend (should your country celebrate this time of year, which many seem to), I was in Halifax replacing my phone, as yesterday’s model was tossed casually into a vat of water towards the end of Sunday (OK, OK, it was the toilet). £51.99 + bus fare + about 20 minutes of my time, surprisingly quick replacement but then again that’s the system for you. Let’s put it behind me. Or under me. Whatever.
