It’s about time we had some more medieval manuscript and the Siege of Troy certainly gives magnificent illumination. This shot only hints at that excellence but I like the captured enthusiasm of the fellow students. I took plenty of photos of my own, don’t worry.
Rarely has it been more welcome to be spending the night at an airport hotel and then undergoing an airport transfer, back in Cape Town. Which, as airports go, is quite manageably sized and decent: better than most. I suppose most of this stuff may genuinely be ‘African’, but it’s still an imagery for travellers rather than anything culturally real.
Ascension Island is, nominally, a dependency of St Helena and lies about 800 miles from it. Whereas there are many friends who think that when I come here (St Helena, that is) I am swanning away to some ‘desert island’, it’s not like that, as my photos make clear. But, as far as I can ascertain, Ascension really is such a place. The plan is that I will be going there in early April, all as part of the same research project that I’ve been working on since 2021.
But Ascension may well be the most bureaucratically impenetrable place I have ever tried to visit. It might be depicted on maps — this one hangs in a corner of Anne’s Place in Jamestown — but does it officially exist? In practice, can your average person actually set foot there? About these things, I am not yet convinced.
After three pictures of inanimate objects mimicking live things, here we have a usually live thing — campus — as a more inanimate object. Teaching finished last week, and today there really weren’t many people around. And that’s it for me, too, not just in 2024: there will be no more campus shots on here until early February, if things go according to plan.
More inaccurate replication of some animal or other — koalas are just not this big, or this colour, though nevertheless, that is what it is supposed to be. 4th prize in the Christmas raffle of the Hebden Bridge Picture House (£1/ticket, if you’re interested). This was very early in the evening: the place filled up by the start of the movie, which was Conclave: very good (another unsolicited advertisement).
Oh dear, I’m in a pub again, and at lunchtime too. However, the Tite & Locke bar is newly opened, on platform 3 of Lancaster station, a place I pass through reasonably often, and usually with Clare, who is not averse herself to the occasional beer. I think I will be coming back here: it certainly made a good first impression (unpaid advertisement).
There was no prospect at all of my leaving the house today. Thoughts — and the discussions with the Zoomland colleagues depicted, vaguely, at the top of the laptop screen — were of planning for next year, not finishing off this one. This is a photowhack: the one and only photograph I took today.
“Some job this is. Waiting around in line for the ice rink to open so we can be pushed around by irritating little brats.”
“Oh, cheer up, Bob. It’s a living.”
“Is it? Shouldn’t we be in Antarctica or something?”
I, and most of the other people on this shot, have just disembarked a train that was due into Victoria at 09:01. As you can see from the time in the heading, it failed to make this commitment. Sadly we are in another one of those periodic troughs in the performance of the local rail network where such outcomes have become normalised. Demands for more Working From Home are as much to do with this as anything else; certainly round here, and certainly for me. And whomever put up the ‘No Entry’ sign can also sod off.
It’s gone from ‘cold and crisp’ to ‘chilly and damp’ so there’s still a need to get the fire going. Indeed this task is not just the responsibility, but the active duty, of those who drink in the Railway during the early shift.
Being 42 