Christmas decorations appearing in early November, I have learned to live with. But Halloween ones appearing more than six weeks before the fact? Ah, goddamit. Society is crumbling. (This may, of course, not be a specific Halloween reference but let me grumble.)
Time to kill before the 11:00 meeting in the city centre. Tea needed to be drunk. Monochrome needed to be used to disguise the fact that this shot is basically out of focus, but losing the colour means I can go for the rustic 1960s bistro effect. Which I’m sure is how Caffe Nero wants to be seen (note: other corporate coffee bar providers are available).
Clare, on the right, has her membership card ready for action. The movie, as the title of the post indicates, was Oppenheimer: which is a decent movie, I’ll acknowledge that, but I’ve stopped thinking that any film needs to be three hours long. (Though these three hours were definitely better than the three hours of my life that Beau is Afraid is never giving back.)
The second picture of the inside of a book in four days, but I am doing a lot of reading at the moment. Anyway, this wasn’t a work book, as the text might indicate — in fact this is an old Doctor Who novel, which I have probably owned for about forty-five years. At some point, it has been merrily munched through, round and round and round again, by some minuscule thing with teeth, making this the first definitive case of bookworm I think I’ve ever seen. At least it didn’t spread, but I won’t be selling this volume on the second-hand market, I feel.
I am occasionally still known to consult that nowadays esoteric and slightly old-fashioned source of information, the ‘book from the library’. This whole date-stamping and cancelling thing seems quite archaic now, doesn’t it? But in 2006 it was still all the rage.
A tasty pasta dish, being prepared by the good chefs of the Eagle pub on Farringdon Road, London. She’s allowed one bit of pasta to escape, but I’ll let that pass.
Back at work in Manchester for the first time since the 3rd. This is usually my first proper sight of the city on any given morning.
A few shots of cinema (or TV, or laptop) screens have featured on here down the years. I suppose it’s a bit of a cheat, but I returned to work today, spent all day at home (work+home, it’s the 21st century way), and there wasn’t much else to look at. Anyway, I quite like this one, the focus seems effective, though of course that’s the work of the cinematographer rather than me — hence the point about cheating.
The movie is Anatomy of a Murder, pretty good, maybe 20 minutes too long though.
In the late 18th century a teenager called John Walton found a great horde of Roman artefacts buried in the village of Ribchester. The most significant object therein was a ceremonial helmet, now displayed in the British Museum in London; what remains in the tiny museum in Ribchester, depicted here, is just a replica.
In which case: why not display it without the glass? If it could be touched, held, perhaps even worn, at least then we could get a sense of the materiality of the thing, experience it as a tangible object. I’m not saying it’s valueless in itself but stick it behind glass and something is lost.
My summer holiday has finally started, and being the type of person that I am, I went exploring, going to Dudley in the West Midlands largely because it was somewhere I had never been before, with not just one but two County Tops (report to follow). And it gave me the chance to walk 1.7 miles, more or less (2,776m according to the sign at the entrance) under ground, through the Netherton Tunnel, which accommodates a branch line of the huge Birmingham canal network, and was the last major canal tunnel ever built in Britain, opened in 1858.
This was taken as I approached the south entrance, which for me was the exit. A bit damp, but by no means an unpleasant experience, though the distant sound of many voices screaming that reverberated down the tunnel towards me for a few minutes — either a school sports day, or the tortured souls of Hell — was a little eerie.
Being 42 