Not an exciting day today I can assure you, but it was never going to be. Except at the end of the match at Hampden, which I guess was pretty exciting, although it’s been a while since I could really raise it for England F. C.
The conference I’m attending here has been organised by UNESCO (as was the one I went to four years ago in Moscow) so we get to feel like the United Nations with our own little flags marking our place on the table: spot my Union Jack, there on the left… Cynics might also say that the general absence of activity is also redolent of the real UN, but hey, even they need refreshment breaks now and again I am sure.
If there are any chess fans out there you might like to know that in this room the Chess Olympiad was held in 2010 and will be again, in 2020.
I am seeing out the day of the UK General Election, June 8th, in Siberia (honestly) so have applied for a postal vote. The ballot paper arrived today. Here it is.
I could leave my commentary there of course. But….. OK, just a few words. In my opinion the decision by David Cameron — a man who got the top job mainly because he went to the right school — to call the referendum on 23rd June last year was about the most ludicrously stupid political move made by a British politician in my lifetime. So moronic was it to do that without the slightest plan for what would happen if the vote was ‘Leave’ that Cameron sodded off not just from being Prime Minister but from the whole of public life within about a fortnight and hasn’t been seen since. In the aftermath of this raving idiocy, the increasingly right-wing lunatics he left behind are still scrabbling for power, and in order to fight what they defined as ‘instability’ (but the rest of the world considers ‘parliamentary democratic process’) they…. create more instability by calling this election. The ‘opposition’ parties could in fact have stopped this; then again they could have done many things differently over the last fifteen months, but for some reason have decided not to fulfil their mandate of keeping the autocrats in check. The result? I look at the ‘choice’ I’m offered, and decide to hold my nose and vote tactically for the first time in my life (readers who don’t know what ‘tactical voting’ is clearly live in an actual democracy, where all votes really do count, and not just a mock one, like we do here).
Four years ago today I began my final journey home after those four months in Australia and frankly the ‘Fuck Off Back To The South Pacific’ quotient has not been higher since. Those who voted Brexit and will vote Tory this time will reap what they sow, I just pray I can get out of their way before they drag me and my family down with them.
Sorry if you dislike all this political ranting, but tune in tomorrow when there’ll be some nice pictures of mountains and sunny weather.
A work trip to Liverpool today (which thanks to recent events required a train tour of most of West Yorkshire and Lancashire to reach). After I had finished there was time to pop into ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’, a.k.a. the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, a modernist masterpiece that started falling down soon after it was finished in the 1960s but seems now to have been finished properly and become a permanent fixture. It is one of those buildings that is very difficult to capture from close up or from any single point within. I changed my mind about this shot at the very last minute but I guess it is my best attempt: I like the way there is no ‘front’ to it, instead the altar is in the centre, which feels more democratic.
I should count up how many photos out of the 2,094 published so far have been taken in or around the Railway Inn, Hebden Bridge. I imagine it must be pushing three figures by now, making the rate one every two or three weeks on average — and that allowing for the two long hiatuses caused by the floods, with it having been closed for the second half of 2012 and pretty much all of 2016. For ten years from about 2005 this was the only pub in Hebden Bridge I drank in (ever) — more recently I have diversified a little, but in the end this is still ‘my local’. Long life and good health to it and all who drink there.
It was time today for the monthly staff development workshop that I organise. Why the Lego? Well, ask the speaker… but the talk was about creative innovation, so always good to have some toys to spark interest. I always try to do something creative each day — the proof has played out over the last five-and-three-quarter years on here.
It’s getting toward the end of the academic year, and our students would like to get jobs of some kind (I presume) so we ran a ‘careers event’ this evening featuring students old and new. Annalisa, on the left, graduated from the degree a decade ago now: Irene, on the right, last year. Kenji behind seems excited about something. Good luck to them all in their various futures.
An exhibit in the Centre for Computing History, in Cambridge: basically a large unit on an industrial estate full of absolutely every old home computer and game system ever released (anyone remember the Jupiter Ace, for example?) — geek heaven in other words. This exhibit is, apparently, all real landfill waste from somewhere in the USA — disposed of after the Atari market collapsed in 1982, all because of a very cruddy E. T. game, apparently. So it can now seem a metaphor for our consumer society, or something. Good museum though.
I don’t do many road trips, I mean, using cars and motorways, but today, and the next few days, is an exception. That means I don’t often get to enjoy the delights of rest stops, service stations, whatever you want to call them. Not that these are places designed to inspire much photography, but I don’t mind this shot, taken through a screen at Markham Moor services on the A1, somewhere in Nottinghamshire. No endorsement of McDonalds’ is implied, although I think their 99p for a tea is fair enough (plenty of other similar places will be prepared to charge £2.50 for same).
An indolent day, still off work, and yes, I was in the pub at 3.30pm, although only for one. Well, maybe a couple. There is something melancholy about it, I know.
Being 42 