Back to work after a ten-day break, the sort of day where drastic measures must be taken to crank the brain into gear. Like concealing oneself in a very secluded but studiously decorated spot and pretending not to be on campus.
We went to Brussels by train, and our return journey terminated in the very marvellous St. Pancras station in London; this has featured twice before on the blog, but both shots were portraits taken down in the subterranean sections and neither featured its impressive architectural features. The pink writing reads “I want my time with you”… I can’t detect any subliminal advertising going on here, and this may just be a feel-good message for the sake of it, in which case, further credit to St. Pancras and its designers.
On a day when the rain came down so hard we were in some danger of flooding again, it’s nice to have some escapism thanks to the Picture House showing Goldfinger. How cool is Connery in this role? Male or female, you surely cannot but want to be him. And as was the case the last time this place did a Bond tribute, the ones up front look pretty cool too.
Graduation fortnight is over, the school holidays have started, and campus was blissfully quiet today. It would be lovely if it stayed like this forever; but we have about seven weeks.
Even less happened today than for the last two days, although this short period of purdah will end tomorrow. Isolation at home forced me to find subjects from the stuff around the house, like this — I mean, everyone has horned sheep skulls on their bedroom window sill, right?
Our last day in Iceland was supposed to end around, oh, say 9am? And we were due home in Hebden Bridge by 2pm.
As you can see from this, this didn’t happen. In fact, we did not leave the airport until 9.30pm, after a litany of farce that I do not wish to begin to recount. Thus, another two hours after this take-off time was promised to us.
You can’t completely see the flight number to identify the budget carrier who inflicted this joke upon us (with no informational updates); let me just say they wear orange. A shame because otherwise this has been an excellent week in Iceland, if you get to visit it I highly recommend it.
Time for a summer holiday. Time for the blog’s 36th country: Iceland. Time for tiny but endearing museums devoted to the Icelandic punk rock scene from the 1970s on, built in old subterranean public toilets. The fabled landscape of Iceland? I’ll capture this if it stops raining. It’s forecast to: eventually.
Could John Logie Baird have foreseen ‘the box set’, I wonder. Perhaps so — after all it’s not radically removed from the novel as Dickens wrote it. With his exams finished, Joe here adopts a position he’ll doubtless choose to remain in all summer, although we’re working on it. Meanwhile, Clare knits to relieve the excitement.
Now that’s a proper library. And I was here for scholarly purposes, too. Occasionally it is still possible to feel that in my profession, things are as they were a couple of centuries ago. I mean, in a good way.
Despite four HB pix in a row I have in fact spent most of the week in Manchester, but — to repeat a frequently-made recent point — it’s not been very exciting. Nor was today, but at least there was plenty of tea and coffee.
Being 42 