Monday 26th June 2017, 10.30am (day 2,132)
How many generations of students have spent their time waiting around in corridors, until the time they are called into the room? It doesn’t change. Did I get the job? Not this time.
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Category Archives: Interior
Norwegians, thinking
Tuesday 20th June 2017, 1.45pm (day 2,126)
In this ongoing image-based narrative of my life I feel like occasionally showing that I earn my right to come to all these nice places, so here’s a picture taken at the staff development workshop I helped run today at UiT (the Arctic University of Tromsø, and there’s a cool name for an educational institution). I think I managed to provoke these people to get thinking…. which is what I do for a living, in the end.
Inside Mansour’s Mac
Friday 16th June 2017, 10.55am (day 2,122)
Have been a Mac owner for nigh on a decade now but realised today I had never before seen inside one — this realisation coming about when my student Mansour turned up in my office and started dismantling his, for reasons that are too unnecessarily complex to reveal here. Anyway, there you go, that’s what it looks like inside. I somehow feel there should be more to it.
In the BBC
Thursday 15th June 2017, 4.00pm (day 2,121)
Visited the BBC site today at Salford Quays for a meeting — which was less glamorous than it may sound. Quay House is graced by a whole six-floor-high wall of these little work pods, which are kind of cute.
Scotland v England in the pub
Saturday 10th June 2017, 5.35pm (day 2,116)
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.
United Nations (sort of)
Wednesday 7th June 2017, 11.45am (day 2,113)
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.
Yet another ballot paper
Thursday 25th May 2017, 7.40pm (day 2,100)
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.
Inside Paddy’s Wigwam
Wednesday 24th May 2017, 2.35pm (day 2,099)
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.
Friday evening in the Railway
Friday 19th May 2017, 6.55pm (day 2,094)
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.
Lego workshop
Tuesday 16th May 2017, 1.00pm (day 2,091)
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.
Being 42 