This Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton is made of Lego — some 80,000 bricks, apparently. Currently the centrepiece of the ‘Art of the Brick’ exhibition in Manchester. Which (review coming up) is not bad, but the creator’s claim to be making high art is a little hard to sustain. On the other hand, who doesn’t like a dinosaur, even a plastic one.
If you don’t get the reference, then clearly you were born after 1985 or thereabouts. Courtesy of the laundry arrangements of the friend who put me up last night.
Dull photo, but it was a dull day as everyone waited for Storm Dennis to see whether it felt like adding to the misery. But it did not.
This blog is really just an outgrowth of the personal diary I have kept every day since the start of 1984. I raided the archive today, and here are a bunch of the thirty or so volumes of my other auto-chronicle. Is there a word for this urge to record things? Whatever the name of the condition, I have it.
Three days in a row in Manchester — teaching must have started again… This also explains the early start today. Expect more of these on subsequent Fridays, to be honest. But at least I know that at 7.15 am in Victoria station, one can purchase pudding and pie.
One of those shots which is a nice arrangement but the OCD in all of us goes, couldn’t you have straightened up the goddamn chairs. Really.
Stalybridge railway station’s buffet bar is perfectly preserved in its early 20th-century state, with no sense of tweeness or fakery: it is also provides the best beer for miles around. As a result of both these things it is locally, and perhaps even nationally, famous. You will not find a better pub at a railway station anywhere else that I know of.
Which means you can experience the best of Stalybridge without ever leaving platform 4 of its station, because it’s not really a place one wants to get to know better. Trust me.
Now that’s a substantial drop in the air pressure. These days the Met Office give names to all the UK’s various stormy moments, which makes it all very media-friendly. But hey, here’s me doing my own media thing so let’s pay tribute to the incoming Storm Brendan and hope it doesn’t screw up my next couple of days too much.
A day out in Liverpool with Joe. The day as a whole was a good one, but let’s not talk about the football match later on. More agreeable was the Slavery Museum on Albert Dock, which while rather (understandably) depressing in places was certainly interesting — if not very big. These are Igbo carvings, I believe. The message in the back is pertinent. But yes, the black line, separating the panes of glass in the display cabinet, does bother me.
This pic was taken on my phone, as something happened today which has always been a possibility — I didn’t charge the camera battery properly and after the first picture of the day, when we were already on our journey, it died. Phone cameras these days do just as good a job of course, so act well as a backup. But one of these days a technical fail may well lead to a day with no photo: the most likely one I can think of being that my SD card breaks when I try to upload pictures the morning after, and thus too late to grab any emergency replacement. I hope that never happens of course, but I do wonder what my reaction would be. After (so far) 3,061 consecutive days of photography it would be something of a blow, to be sure.
Friday was one of those highly exciting days spent entirely working at home (or, I admit, in the pub after), and with little light outside. I have this thesis to examine in a couple of weeks so finished reading it today — it having been lugged aroud the Lakes on Wednesday too. What’s my opinion on it? Well, that’s not for this forum. But at least the task will get me to Belfast in a fortnight, and provide more diverse material for this blog.
A day on which I got plenty of work done, but which was of such profound photographic dullness that I was grateful for what opportunities arose. The only time I left the house was for my bi-annual teeth scrape at the dentists’, so here’s a pseudo-selfie in the waiting room. One of the few of my 3,000+ shots to come with its own frame, anyway.
Being 42 