Seeing as I am off work, no reason at all to avoid an afternoon (and free) showing of Some Like It Hot at the Picture House — one of my favourite movies, and surely everyone likes that one. Unexciting photography of a very familiar place, but as the week develops, these things should change.
Five days after Joe’s version, I get to attend another graduation ceremony, only this time in professional rather than parental capacity, so I was sat up at the front. But it felt more like the back, and quite comfortably at the back, so I could get away with some photography. I am pleased with this shot: it was what I intended when the shutter was pressed.
Many such items have appeared in our house down the years and I don’t deny I have my equivalents, but this latest one of Clare’s is particularly honest about whether there is any point to it all. The organising I mean, not life itself.
I seem unable to get outside much at the moment — this is the fifth interior in a row and the 11th in the last 13 days. But I do have some work to do. For now, at least. Note: Drew is not a student midwife. The journey that mug has made in order to now reside at our place has been a saga in itself, in fact.
With little else to do today (the football season hasn’t started yet), I visited the Calderdale Industrial Museum and learned some things about local industry around the Halifax area that I didn’t know before. Like, John Mackintosh became very rich and successful, founding the company that bore his name, and whose successors still manufacture Quality Street chocolates in Halifax, thanks only to the cooking of his wife Violet. She was the one who invented modern toffee — he was the one who called himself “The Toffee King”, though.
But for the photo, I’ll go with this mass of red and blue strands of wool, all converging into the Jacquard loom that is currently operating to the right, having been turned on for a few minutes during which time it produced plenty of noise and a few dozen lines of carpet.
I am still occasionally invited to offer words of wisdom in the professional settings of others. Which is nice, because no one ever listens to you at your own place of work. (Perhaps that’s just me, though.) And one gets the chance to check out classic 1960s brutalist architecture — in this case, the Heslington campus of the University of York — on another pleasant sunny day. There were worse ways to end the working week.
These days it’s 8:52 that is my more usual arrival time into Manchester Victoria, on days when I deign to show my face there. Today was early, for me. I had forgotten how much busier it is. Everyone is being sucked towards the ticket gates as if by a tractor beam.
Well, I got five out of these six. But we didn’t win the quiz. Lost on a tiebreaker. Goddamit.
The tour of Scotland, or at least, the eastern-central part of that country, continued with a visit to “Scotland’s Secret Bunker“, which until 1992 or thereabouts was maintained as the home-to-be of government in Scotland were that country (and presumably the rest of the UK) ever to be taken out by a couple of dozen nuclear missiles. It says a lot for the managerial mindset that a significant amount of money was spent on building and maintaining this place, with its various dormitories, a broadcasting station, two cinemas, a canteen (still in use, for visitors), state-of-the-art air conditioning and fire protection and various Monitoring and War Rooms (“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!”). Plus a clinic, as pictured here with its touches of black humour.
That this is now open to visitors, albeit privately owned and charging a healthy price (£50 for the three of us), is some consolation but begs a natural question — where’s the current version of this? Or versions, as there were long-standing and fairly plausible rumours that another one of these sat up on Ashdown Forest in Sussex, near Crowborough where I grew up. And how much do they cost in terms of, say, nurses’ or teachers’ salaries? The place was definitely worth a visit, if only to invoke such questions in Joe’s mind.
Took the wife out for dinner. Out of this kitchen came — or going on the time, had already come — a couple of reasonably decent fish dishes. I don’t believe I have yet to meet a chef who looks like the roly-poly stereotype depicted in the cartoon (and that picture is really why I took the shot): I don’t believe most of them have the time to eat enough to get fat, to be honest.
Being 42 