Campus is nice when it’s like this, and there’s no one about. Doubtless this photo and the general level of lassitude around Manchester at the moment will be taken by neoliberals as evidence of our heroic lack of efficiency blah blah, but it’s at times like this that you actually get the work done.
A Saturday without a football match to go to. How odd. Instead I paid a visit (amongst other things) to the wife’s treatment room down in town. The tools for Lego therapy are all there awaiting the end of the post-Christmas hiatus. What is Lego therapy? Art therapy — but with Lego. It works… so I’m led to understand.
According to my phone pedometer: number of steps done yesterday = 38,855. Number done today = 839. This is an accurate reflection of things.
One reason I didn’t go out yesterday was because there’s always today. Start as you mean to go on? Perhaps. Happy New Year.
OK, it’s Manchester, not New York… But it is The Producers. So it’s Broadway really. All together now… “Springtime…”
No one, for once, told me I couldn’t take photos during the performance so I got a couple. I’m quite pleased with this one, which is one of the few photos from which I have not cropped even a pixel; and considering the symmetry that’s worth noting.
Not quite ‘last minute’ Christmas shopping but I did finish it off today. My, there’s a whole load of tat in the world, and as it’s been manufactured for generations by now, ‘Antiques Centres’ can fill themselves with it all and sell it on, until then the owners die and there’s a house clearance and it all goes back on sale again. I did like this bevy of porcelain figures though; not that I bought any (whether at £18 or otherwise). Although the blonde at the back was doing her best to tempt potential buyers.
Travelling, and working, and having a cup of tea, in Munich central station, which is so huge that you go two stops on the S-bahn train before you actually leave its awnings. I found my little corner of it for a time. A decent trip to Germany, but time to go home.
The reason I came to Germany was to come to a conference here, at the University of Passau, right in the bottom right-hand (south-east) corner of the country. The best experience I had at it was to get plugged in for ten minutes to an amazing virtual reality rig — created by students — which replicated, and rather well, the experience of being in a zero-gravity environment, specifically an abandoned space station. Once I got over the dizziness and tried to forget that my legs were relevant in this place, it was very effective. I wish I could somehow have photographed my own immersion, but that didn’t prove possible, so here’s fellow delegate Reni playing with it, after me.
And so off I go to Germany for the second time this year, after Berlin in August. Munich was not my final destination, but I passed through this afternoon while changing from plane to train. It seemed appropriate that my best chance to take a representative picture came in this beer hall, for after all, that is probably the city’s most famous product. However, being honest, I don’t particularly like Munich — a couple of previous visits have suggested to me that the place is rather overrated, I just don’t find it a very interesting or exciting city. Anyway — that’s why I was just passing through.
Sometimes I have to work on Sundays, though always at home. Today, a sudden desire for soft-boiled eggs was one unexpected consequence.
Being 42 