2017-18 is my thirteenth academic year at the University of Manchester, meaning that today was the 39th opening day of a term there. Samuel Alexander has seen more than me, certainly as a bust in the foyer of his eponymous building: but according to his memorial he did 31 years as a functioning professor (of Philosophy) so I’ll catch him up in, er…. 2036.
I might be off work but there’s still lots of terribly important jobs to do around the house. Like deal with the chaos that the 300 or so DVDs and VHS tapes have descended into down the years. Two hours saw it done, with only one major ‘collapse’ moment. Here, inspect a couple of the Ms…
It’s student video-making season: Sissi (bottom left) becomes the latest to come to my office and point a camera at me for sundry purposes. While she reviewed her footage, I became intrigued by her tripod. This is an inanimate object with a secret inner life if ever there was one. People go to certain clubs dressed like this.
Great night out, thanks again to the wife and Red Helen for the music. Terrible photography, but that’s 10.40pm on a Friday night for you.
There are worse places to come and do a couple of days’ work than London and worse buildings to spend the first day in than the British Library. I seem to have come out looking like the business end of a felt pen, but still, I quite like this one. Day 2,400 of the blog, a nice round number so I have updated the stats (if you really want to see how obsessively anal one can get with chronicling). I calculate day 2,500 should come at the end of June.
This blog isn’t intended to be political and it’s been a little while since I had cause to depict the lousy state of the local train service. I know this can be a default position for the commuter, that it’s always terrible, but really, Arriva Northern have surpassed themselves in recent months with overcrowding and cancellations. I am lucky – I can organise my day to avoid peak rush hours, on the whole, hence the timing of this shot. Many cannot and are forced to put up with the same crap every week day.
A profoundly uneventful day, spent entirely at home, working, with grey light. Time to poke around in the dusty corners of the house to get a usable photo — and to be thinking that maybe it was time they were made a little less dusty.
I wonder how many reputed bits of the Berlin Wall there are remaining in the world. I used to have at least one bit of rubble that was definitely part of it, because I removed it myself, on my one visit to Berlin in September 1990 when there was still quite a bit of it standing and being pulled down by tourists. Every bit of it that I could see at that time had been heavily graffitied so either this big, relatively clean chunk standing in the Imperial War Museum in London is from something else, or (more likely) this stood on the inside, facing the no-man’s land that stood between East and West from 1961-1989.
Whatever. Decent museum, the IWM, takes an even-handed view of its subject matter. And free, for now.
In some shots it’s a matter of trying to stand as exactly in the centre of the pattern as is possible. I think I nearly made it but the window at the end betrays a slight bias to the left. But then of course if I was that worried about symmetry I would have ditched the shot when my colleague walked through the door.
Hey, I’m not morally censuring. A few seconds after taking this shot (oh look…. sunshine!), I also ignored the signage. Everybody does. Come off the footbridge leading to platforms 4-6 on Victoria station and you can ignore it, too.
Being 42 