Walking home after a barbecue at a friend’s house. I like this photo partly because of the way the sunset light has caught the clouds of insects accompanying us on our journey, but also because when Clare saw this on the camera she went “bloody hell, he’s as tall as I am”. Which is true, now she comes to mention it.
And why not. It was a warm day, and a Friday. I felt the same way today, I must admit.
Normally our journey home from London wouldn’t take us through York but we ended up there because of a blockage on the line at Wakefield. It didn’t really extend our journey time much, to be fair. I took this shot while sat on our Hebden Bridge train waiting for it to leave, and like it because until I uploaded it onto the laptop this evening I didn’t realise how I’d captured this mother and son a couple of platforms away. I wasn’t particularly taking a photo of them, just of this group of people sat over there, and it’s nice sometimes when you get something unexpected.
The weekend in London continues. Visited the Victoria and Albert museum partly to see an exhibition and partly because I had never previously been there in my 46 years. The museum was opened in 1857 and has the largest collection of art and design objects in the world, the scale of which — 6.5 million objects — becomes apparent when you wander around the fairly large building and realise that even then only a tiny proportion of the collection is on display. This artist was one of a group sketching a sculpture which had made it out to public view.
For me there’s something kind of suburban or small-town about ice cream vans, so it’s nice to find one in the centre of one of the biggest cities in Europe. Good idea today though, it was very hot and humid in London, and indeed elsewhere today.
The title has a double meaning. Yes, it’s a new era for Victoria station, which after a long period of renovation is now just about finished and looks infinitely better for it. It’s also a new era photographically. Half an hour after taking yesterday’s shot my old Fujifilm Finepix camera conked out, I’ve had it some three years now and used it (obviously) every day so I suppose it was due to happen at some point. Went into Manchester partly to buy another one. I can’t afford to upgrade however so we are now working with a Canon Sureshot compact. You can work out, through following this blog, whether I get on with it as well as its late predecessor.
It’s the midsummer weekend, but right now the weather isn’t so as you’d realise this. If it were midsummer weather these benches would be packed, but it’s chill and rather grey so only Paddy braves the pub forecourt, and that’s only because he needs a cigarette.
Amazingly we managed to get money off the university this year to have an end-of-year dinner. Why this particular stone started shedding blood for the first time in my 10 years there, I have no idea. Dan (left, student) and Gary (right, colleague) wait to place our order in the highly distinctive surroundings of the old vault — check out those safety deposit boxes — in the former bank building which now houses Jamie’s Italian in Manchester (its second appearance on the blog, after this one 15 months ago).
A highly unexciting day, in all senses including photographically. But exploiting the back of the coffee machine may have given some surrealist quality to my creative efforts this afternoon.
You know the score by now I am sure, and in any case had a week’s advance notice of this year’s Handmade Parade in Hebden Bridge. The sun shone and a fine day was had by all.
