It’s Friday, it’s 5pm and, well, we’re in the usual place. It’d be great if the golden glow behind the beer glass was some tropical sunset, but sadly not, In fact we’ve barely seen sunshine for two weeks.
And another photo taken at a railway station but not depicting a train — or, in this case, even any tracks. Birmingham New Street, the busiest railway station in the UK outside London, is almost the epitome of a hole in the ground, with all the tracks squatting below the gigantic retail edifice that is the station building itself. I suppose, up there, the place is OK but the platforms are not a place in which one feels like hanging around very long. Still, at least our train home was punctual, unlike the last time I depicted the place on here.
It’s the new year, and thoughts turn to those of health and happiness in the months to come. I think my blood pressure is OK, a little on the high side perhaps but nothing really major to worry about.
Courtesy of Clare’s Xmas present for her mother (Carol), and the ‘Lightroom’ immersive movie theatre at the Aviva Studios in Manchester, we got to go Moonwalking today, at least for a little while. The main thing I learned was that the Moon has really good landscape photography potential. Other than that, was it worth £30 for 50 minutes of Tom Hanks’s narration and other people’s children, not yet familiar with the concept of quiet contemplation, being boisterous? Hmmm, well, just about.
I did try to crop it so the feet to the bottom left, and the corner of the ceiling to top left were not visible: but it didn’t work out.
It is the limbo period between Christmas and New Year, and while many of us might see this as an opportunity to do very little, our Clare (being who she is) decides to launch into a significant manufacturing operation. In Fight Club the Paper Street Soap Company was a front for the manufacture of bombs and general subversion, but I assume that’s not the case here. Who knows for sure, though.
The hat with the Scroogey message has been hanging around the house for years, having been acquired from I-Don’t-Remember-Where. Here it is added to a pile of gear C was intending to wear to the first in a run of her Christmas parties. Her excuse could be that it’s the only suitable headgear in the house, but that, in itself, says a lot about why it still sees use.
A senior professorial colleague once said: “you’re a Reader. Do some fucking reading.” He was right. And there’s no reason why I need to prematurely leap out of bed to do it.
341 days into Bradford’s reign as the 2025 UK City of Culture and it does, at least, seem to have a) finished the roadworks and b) decided to try to tell people why they should visit (this is one of three similar murals in the bowels of Bradford Interchange bus station). But let’s assume that it has been a useful year for them. It is a decent city, better than some.
R. I. P. Martin Parr, by the way; if there is one photographer who I suppose I might be trying to consciously emulate, it was probably him. Check out his work if you are at all interested in this medium.
This brand of beer (not mine, but the wife drinks it) has recently appeared at the Railway and the almost unanimous contention among the clientele is that its logo is quite the worst and most inappropriate piece of branding ever seen there — and it appears on the pump, too (an ugly, blocky, monstrous columnar thing that now dominates the bar). Why does a sweaty male figure who looks like a cross between Boris Yeltsin and Boris Johnson — definitely a Boris then — somehow epitomise a Spanish beer with a woman’s name? And did I really have nothing better to photograph on a Friday? Both of these things seem to have come to pass, though.
I know I said yesterday that the weather was coming in, but this is ridiculous…. Behold, though, the opening frames of a certain 1980s TV classic, watched in its entirety tonight. Apart from Zaphod Beeblebrox, who adds almost nothing to it, it’s still funny and clever. There’s absolutely no plot, though.
Being 42 