This is where the Hebden Bridge trains join up with the West Coast main line, thus, trains for the Lake District and Morecambe. I spend a hell of a lot of time in Preston station – never for very long at a time, but it mounts up, and I’ve spent far longer here in my life than I have in Preston itself.
This is becoming a regular event both on the Hebden Bridge social calendar generally and also on this blog, having previously featured in October and March in this regular form as well as the one-off event for the Arts Festival in July. It is enjoyable in its own right and gives plenty of photo opportunities, not all of which can be taken advantage of due to restrictions on photography, plus the added challenge of taking pictures in very low light while tanked up with several pints of beer, like this one. It’s not bad though. Do you need faces to get a mood? The night is over, people are about to go home…
Plenty of photo opportunities in Tampere this evening as they are in the midst of some arts festival and there were lots of street ‘happenings’ tonight. But though I thought the capoeira performance would be a rich seam for pictures it turned out mainly to be a kind of monotonous cross between kung fu and hare krishna chanting. This mother and child watching it were much cuter.
Hey, I’ve just noticed it’s day 350 of the blog. 16 to go before I’ve done the full year: and also time to add some to the ‘Best of the Rest’ page. I’ll do that shortly.
It’s Sunday night as I post this; I came back in the afternoon from what I could describe as a ‘weekend away in the Lake District’, but that doesn’t really sum it up very well. Actually I have just spent two days walking, through weather that could best be described as ‘mixed’ (see tomorrow’s post). I have bagged 9 – more than a quarter – of the fells remaining on my project and now have only 23 to go.
I broke the journey at the Black Sail youth hostel. Located at the head of the valley of Ennerdale, this is some two miles’ walk from the nearest other building, let alone road. It sleeps about 20 people and was about two-thirds full on Saturday night. It’s a great oasis in the hills. And it serves beer. These two were part of a group who worked in Edinburgh and were all parasitology researchers, or something. They drank wine with me and we played Yahtzee (Lisa, lying down in this picture, won) and we and the other guests could just forget the rain outside for a little while.
I never sleep on planes. The flight passed relatively quickly (a decent movie helped – Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, better than I thought it would be), and there’s the odd feeling of seeing the night flit by in half the time it would normally take, but otherwise there’s no appeal to this mode of travel. Electronic devices are a big help these days, of course. I like this shot because of the light, particularly the rim-light around the head of the guy on the left.
Tough choice of photo today. I saw most of the city today courtesy of a driving tour in the morning from my friend/colleague Sharon, who works at the University of New Orleans, then I walked round the French Quarter in the evening, along with about twenty thousand other tourists. I took the photos everyone else takes, of St Louis Cathedral, inside a jazz club etc., and some I really liked, doubtless one or possibly more will appear on the ‘best of the rest’ page at some point soon.
However, from the five strong candidates for today’s pic of the day I went with this one. This guy was sat by the river, silently, drinking from his can of beer, as I promenaded along the levee which runs along the south side of Decatur Street. He looked so melancholy, a great contrast to all the revelry going on along Bourbon Street just three blocks away. The lights of the city in this, one of the world’s most famous rivers, set his silhouette off very well, so I’m going for this one.
Was invited to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans this evening at the start of a very pleasant evening out with someone who I met for the first time in Moscow two weeks ago. There were many good people shots that got taken today but this was, for me, the best.
Anyone who’s been to New Orleans knows that its visual attractions are varied and eye-opening. You’ll doubtless be seeing more of the city itself – and its inhabitants and visitors – over the next few days.
But here’s the reason I’m here, the Blackboard World 2012 conference at the truly colossal Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – a building that is literally a mile in length. This is Michael Chasen, the CEO of the company, at his morning keynote. I like the pose I’ve caught him in and also the display on the board behind him, which is a neat way of summarising it. He did have a reason to talk about pee particularly, but I won’t spoil the mystery by telling you what it was.
This is the worst thing I have had to post about on this blog.
Until 1.15pm today had been a very uneventful day. It then started raining: hard. Very, very hard.
By 2.15pm the road on which I live had become a river, and then we saw that the lane which goes into the woods was pouring out water (and stones). Whether it was just rainwater or whether, as some speculated, the old reservoir at the top of the woods had burst its banks, the normally placid mill stream turned into a torrent. Where it goes under the main Keighley Road and through a sluice pipe into the river, this backed up against the retaining wall to an astonishing degree, rising literally 15 feet in half an hour and eventually pouring through the gardens of the two houses nearest the bridge.
The owners of the house were not in. Myself and other neighbours tried to save vital items and – most importantly – the two dogs (which you have seen before on this blog). But most of the ground floors were taken out. Our house is uphill from the stream, so was fine (a couple of idiot drivers ploughing through the stream at 30mph being the main threat).
More photos and footage can be seen on YouTube and Facebook for those into their weather porn. For comparison, the lake you see in the woods at a couple of points is where we played mölkky the other day.
I’m supposed to be going to New Orleans tomorrow, by the way – but I ain’t promising anything. At the moment, Hebden Bridge is impassable to cars.
This was supposed to happen last weekend. Once a year the populace of Hebden Bridge spend a little while building ephemeral but beautiful costumes and parade down the town to the park. It’s like Carnival in Rio, but shorter, with less naked flesh and in Yorkshire. A lot of fun though. Today it became something of a two-finger-salute to the weather, which for the entire month of June (except maybe for 3 days around the 18th) has been dreadful. Market Street – the main road through the centre of Hebden – has been devastated, with maybe two or three businesses out of about 30 still open, or likely to reopen before September. And it was still raining today – in bursts, but they were heavy bursts.
I took 89 photos of the parade within the 17 minutes it took to pass me; so to pick just one was very difficult. That being the case, interested parties could look at the top 20 pics, on my Facebook site. But I pick this one for here mainly because of the happy smile of the central model and the fact that this was the only picture of all the ones I took which I felt worked despite the fact there was a spectator firmly in the background. For some reason, it just seems to work with him there. We were all in it together, so to speak. And for just a short time we forgot the floods and the rain and just enjoyed the spectacle.
Being 42 