I don’t know whether St Bernadette’s — the church in the background — was busy on this Sunday morning, possibly it was. Hough End Playing Fields across the road certainly was, although this picture doesn’t capture the fact that at least half-a-dozen sports matches of various kinds were taking place around me at this point. I like the combination of the bright orange shirt and the slight dullness and tattiness of the background.
While we have been teaching in one half of the hotel’s ‘business centre’, the other has been occupied by a large number of extremely attractive models of both sexes, getting ready for the fashion show that occupied the ballroom this afternoon — a specifically Russian event, it seems. I think if I possessed this woman’s shape, not to mention her ability to support her posture on what looks like two narrow pencils, I’d probably become a model too. The guy on the right isn’t badly sculpted either.
At least by recent standards, this has been (and will remain) a very uneventful week. But one can still take notes about it. Clare, indeed, can take notes about almost anything, a phenomenon I have been observing for more than a quarter of a century now. Note both the writing and the pointing hand: the information is being processed even at the moment of its creation…
Now I’m at home, the risk is run of having nothing particularly interesting or different to photograph — and that was certainly the case today. With apologies to my friends gathered around the fire for the usual Friday evening transition, who are of course interesting (most of the time) but maybe not all that different, at least, not to me.
I’ve been here before — not just in life, but on the blog, with this picture, taken on my first trip to St Helena. That one is also in black-and-white, and today that aesthetic move relieves some of the more garish colouring, particularly of the Hawaiian shirt of the guy on the left. Who, by the way, keeps saying hello to me as if he’s never met me before, whereas in the past we’ve had numerous conversations. But perhaps I am just forgettable, in a way that he is not.
I try not to put too many football pictures up here but I do like this one, simply because of her face, and the general contrast with the rest of the scene. And it does epitomise the day, with me not having arrived in the city until noon, local time. Either way, the match (Cape Town City v Orlando Pirates) and the general experience were very fine: a great introduction to the country.
I don’t entirely do the Cult of Celebrity but tonight I’m making an exception. I think most of the audience of The Tempest — with Sigourney Weaver as Prospero — stuck to the rules and did not spend the whole performance taking pictures (and she was on stage throughout every minute): but no one said anything about the curtain call. It’s not often one gets to see a movie legend in the flesh.
After the interest and congeniality of Padiham the day before, Salford City v Morecambe, my last football match of 2024 was one of the worst of the lot, a truly dire game in a characterless metal box. The general demeanour of this gentleman, captured at half-time, sums it up. Time to move on — though for Morecambe this movement increasingly looks like it will be downward again, and back out of the League at some point in the spring. Perhaps I’m wrong, but you didn’t see them play today.
Attempts to create a new tradition by running a bunch of tractors and trucks, decorated in lights, through the centre of Hebden Bridge on 24th December were greeted by this photographer as an opportunity to depict something different on the 14th Christmas Eve to grace these virtual pages. Did he (I) really see the point, though? Well, not really. But it did draw a reasonably sized crowd.
Joe — or his hands, anyway — makes his first visit to Hebden Bridge since the summer, and first appearance on the blog since 7th September, demonstrating a rather nifty card trick: I did work out how it was done in the end, but it took some figuring out.
Can we both note that the deck of cards (and they are all like that, more-or-less) in fact belongs to the wife, although she claims I bought it for her….
Being 42 