After, like everyone else, having ‘a couple of years off due to Covid’, the annual Imperial Stormtrooper Convention gathers once again in hall Darth 4 of the Emperor Palpatine Memorial centre. “It was so nice to be able to strap on the white plastic again”, one delegate was heard to mutter through the helmet.
Or, maybe, it’s a Lego construction, exhibited at this year’s Bricktastic in Manchester. You decide.
For the first three weeks of this semester I have been giving some classes in the Chemistry building, where resides this interesting display: I’m sure you realise what is going on here. As today was the last of these three classes, and I may never come back in here again, I thought I would capture it while I had the chance. They have omitted to include examples of the radioactive elements, but that’s probably a good thing.
22/02/2022 was today’s date, and a Twosday too: so Radon, to bottom right, perhaps is the most representative of these.
The students are back — fortunately — and campus was busy today. All the same I want to epitomise the day with this unpeopled shot. If even recycling bins, and yellow warning signs, can look pretty, then you know the light is something special.
Is it too early to be in the pub on a Saturday afternoon? When the weather outside is as grim as it was today, then no. The welcome inside was much warmer.
Serious combat in the Railway this evening. Somehow black and white photography seems appropriate for this subject matter.
“God’s Own Junkyard” — and that’s its official name — is a bar/café in Walthamstow, London, but that doesn’t even begin to describe it. In fact it’s a museum of neon; what you see here is barely 1% of the whole stock. I wonder what their electricity bill is like.
My friend Geri was one of the very first people to appear on this blog: that’s her in the foreground of the shot of Joe on day 9. In the intervening time she, like me and everyone else, has got ten years and nearly five months older, and in her case that has led, today, to a birthday with a 0 on the end — though I will spare her blushes by not specifying which one. We’re still in the same place, however: not just the same pub, but the same room. Happy birthday to her.
A twinge in my leg meant I booked myself in for a massage, but any images that word may conjure up, of women lying blissfully on a couch while being gently caressed, can be dismissed in favour of being wrestled and half-beaten into submission. At least I did not plump for the acupuncture; this model in the foyer of the House of Pain suggests there are far too many points of fresh, new torture to discover on the human body.
This post harks back to Tuesday — not that I needed the ice axe and microspikes on that glorious day, in fact it was laughable overpacking, which in some perverse way may explain why they’ve not yet been put away. I’d rather have been walking today too, but the house, and the marking load, was my prison.
The Railway has acquired one of these devices. I like pinball; it is a highly pointless activity but the complexity and fine engineering of the machines is often impressive. Are there entire degree programmes devoted to Pinball Studies I wonder? This shot is, of course, taken through glass, hence the reflected text at the top, which might almost be Cyrillic, though you’ll eventually work it out (the machine has a circus theme).
Being 42 