Well, today was a photographic challenge — because since shortly after taking yesterday’s shot I have been feeling ill and spent almost the whole of today in bed. This burst of sunlight onto the back of the bedroom door is therefore the best you get today. You may yet get the same tomorrow. And why does the door have two handles? A legacy of when this was Joe’s room and he was still just a toddler.
This place is a godsend early in the morning, and rarely empty. I’m not normally round this corner, but for once I had my cup of tea sat down at the tables inside instead of on the train. Earliest shot for a while, since late November in fact (and only the fourth shot before 7.30 in the last 12 months). It’s still dark outside at this time.
Snapped for no other reason than I liked the image. There is no deeper agenda. Another pleasantly sunny winter’s day in Manchester.
With 40 minutes to kill in King’s Cross station on our way back from Brighton, I entertained myself by watching these activities. When the new King’s Cross was opened a couple of years ago this little memorial had been installed seemingly by the builders, and was left largely unmolested; when the Harry Potter shop opened and colonised it shortly afterwards, and started charging visitors to get their mitts on the trolley, the queues, absent before, started appearing. QED.
I have a weekend to catch up on, and a very good weekend it was. Here, in London on Friday night, is where it began — specifically the ‘Princess Louise’ pub on High Holborn, a great old-fashioned Victorian drinking palace with tiles, etched mirrors, little booths and snugs and good beer, what more does one need? (The flare to the bottom right of the image is a bit distracting, but I think I get away with it.)
Such is the name of this fast food joint, our one of choice partly because it is next to the Railway pub, but also because it does do good food, well made. I don’t cook every night you know.
The gym I go to has a rotating exhibition of photographs or paintings and I put my name down to do it some time ago. In December I got a call saying my turn had come round so here we are, my first proper exhibition. You see here four of the smaller landscape photos, there are eighteen in total, eleven landscapes and seven wildlife pictures, some of which have been seen on the blog (the one on the left here is this shot of Helvellyn in the Lake District, from 2/12/11, for example). So I’m kind of proud of this and wanted it to be documented on here at some point. You also see here Phil, one of the gym regulars, the sort of bloke in his late fifties you know for a fact is about three times as healthy as yourself.
More Victorian architecture. But because I had to start work again today after my Christmas break, I never left the house, and because I live in a piece of it, Victorian architecture is what you get.
However, there is some additional relevance to the picture, which is that after about a week of heroic house clearance and trips to the tip, sorry, ‘Household Waste Recycling Centre’, this old fireplace is actually visible again for the first time in about two years. Not to mention the floor of this room. Worth documenting, then, in my opinion….
So here we are at the end of 2013. I cannot really complain about any of it, at a personal level — an excellent year, full of incident and variety. No fewer than 14 countries have featured on this blog since 1/1/13 and even if four of those are explained by airport stopovers that’s still a mighty haul. 2014 will start slowly on that front but if everything works out I know that, at least, the US, Greenland and Italy will have featured by the end of the summer, as well as returns to familiar places like Norway and Russia. But who knows for sure. That’s the fun of it. For what it’s worth I think that October 11th’s is my favourite single shot of 2013 (one of the UK ones, taken in Cumbria) — though there were several other very good candidates.Note also that if I keep this going — and I do intend to — I will reach the 1,000 day mark on 21st May 2014.
As for 31/12, photographically the year ends with three monochrome shots in a row, but it is all rather grey at the moment so seems fitting. We attended (in fact, organised) a party for our local neighbourhood last night and it went well, thanks largely to the free beer donated by a brewer friend.
Clare works here during the school term but at the moment, obviously, it is closed. We dropped off some spare toys today, being as we are clearing the house at the moment, so I used the opportunity to get a shot of the nice afternoon light within, at a point where I can do this without being arrested for taking photos of other people’s kids (these things have been known).
