Never easy to know what to choose to epitomise Christmas Day, particularly when it’s been a fairly uneventful one — though nice, just spent with the family, eating, socialising, etc. The decorations on the dinner table will do as well as anything to represent this… with a guest appearance from Iris the lego lady. A happy Christmas to you all, however you have spent it.
We approach the anniversary of last year’s floods on December 26th, which took out most of Hebden Bridge’s town centre. Prior to that, this place, the Railway pub, had probably featured at least once a month for the four and a half years I’d been doing it, so say about 50 times…. But none since 22/12/15. I think this has been the last of all the businesses in the town to reopen after that day, but here you are…. One year to the day since last we drank there. Welcome back.
This blog has simple rules, and only a few of them, but I stick to them, and they shape what appears in subtle ways. The one about only using what ambient light is present at the scene certainly does, and is the reason why there end up being relatively few photos like this one. I do have a social life… but I don’t have expensive lenses and I don’t carry around a tripod so in low-light environments like clubs, it’s just very difficult to produce decent shots. Still, this one isn’t bad, and depending on what happens for the rest of today (I post on Sunday morning) you might yet get another shot from the Trades Club’s ‘Spectrum’ 80s music night for tomorrow, too. A good night out was had all round…
After three days at home, working, made it back into the big city, to do some more work. So be it. I like this shot because while I’d normally feel that the newspaper stands were clutter, here I like how they feel akin to the people, randomly distributed across the field of view. And the patches of green colour to the right.
We haven’t put the curtains back up yet. But otherwise it is nice to be back in the living room after the Great Halloween Plaster Disaster three weeks ago. Hopefully this ceiling will stay up for a while. Like until 2050.
What was intended to be an uneventful day spent entirely working at home was interrupted by a huge crash from downstairs at about 10.00am, followed about thirty seconds later by another one. The cause turned out to be two huge chunks of our living room ceiling having unexpectedly descended: old lath-and-plaster deciding after what was probably at least forty years, and maybe more, that it had all had enough. Fortunately no one was sat in there at the time. So, I still spent the day entirely working at home, only on unpaid manual labour instead of all that wishy-washy uni crap. This was a couple of hours into the clean-up operations — you should have seen it at the start…
Took my bad post-party head into a day of teaching and meetings and it really was quite as exciting as this shot reflects. Clare has been trying to deconstruct this photo as I put together this post and seems to think this is about death and life juxtaposed, or something. So who am I to argue?
On Sunday morning this room was full, but clearly Clare and I were the only people who felt like extending their stay at the Arundel Park hotel into Monday morning. What the hell, it’s been an excellent weekend.
It’s Clare’s birthday on Wednesday, one of those significant ones — or rather, one that we culturally choose to assign significance to because it has a zero at the end. Anyway, the celebrations are taking place in various locations over the next few days and start this weekend with her & I going down to Brighton, where this shot is taken. It’s a mess I know, but so are most things by 10.35pm on a Friday night out; the time makes this the latest shot on the blog since June 2015.
My six days in Prague come to an end. It’s a very beautiful city, if you’ve never been, you should visit. I know the sign on this shot looks wonky: it’s funny how the camera can distort perspective quite easily sometimes.
Being 42 