The year is not going to end excitingly, but at least one can still go out, as I did today, even if just to do some shopping. This is an abstract, but the focus is right and it’s the shot I intended. I noticed the possibility of a shot of these chargers between the seats as the bus rumbled over the hills to the north, but no chance to capture it until we had stopped moving; meaning that Oxenhope can here get another day on its tally.
Two monochromes in a row to continue the grey and misty post-Christmas mood. Further exposure for Halifax’s scenic qualities, too; that’s four times in ten days it has appeared. Why do I call this post ‘Deep in the bus station’? I guess there’s a sense of being at the end of a tunnel here, looking out through successive waves of glass and steel.
Jamestown is one of the very few places in St Helena where you can actually get down to sea level, and that, plus its place on the leeward side of what can be a rather windy island, is why the town is there. There’s no actual harbour, though. The boats and yachts congregate out to sea, and this evening, caught a few rays.
I have to move into different accommodation for the last few days of my stay and am unlikely to get internet access for the remaining time here; so the next few days probably won’t be uploaded until I get home on December 2nd. See you then.
Is this working? Hmmm, seems to be.
OK then, I am successfully online on one of the world’s most remote islands, 1,200 miles from the nearest other land. The landing — on a bare airstrip perched on top of piles of volcanic cinder — was not as rough as I’d been led to believe it might be. Ten days of quarantine await, however; you and I both will have plenty of opportunities to inspect my accommodation between now and my release on Friday 19th.
My first stop on the journey today was York, and here is its fine-looking railway station. I upload this while sat in Stansted Airport terminal along with a handful of other people, and no places of refreshment open. So there’ll be nothing more to picture today before the flight leaves just after midnight. I’ll see you in quarantine, somewhere in the South Atlantic.
I was all packed and ready to go on my Atlatnic journey on schedule. But with a 24-hour flight delay to sit through first, the mild irony of this bus, the latest (irrelevant) ‘rail replacement’, did occur to me.
I’m off tomorrow though. My Internet connection will be unpredictable until the end of November, so for the next three weeks I’ll upload when I can.
Following my comments yesterday, at least the trains were still running in the other direction from home, so as often seems to happen on a Saturday, I found myself changing at Leeds station. I’ve been thinking of a shot like this for a while; taken specifically from the stairs going down to platform 16, and therefore looking across the whole width of the station. Busy scenes, and let’s demand they stay that way.
Could the great railway pioneers of Britain — people of vision and enterprise, greats like Brunel, say, or Stephenson — have conceived of the ‘rail replacement bus’, do you think? Particularly at 7.50am when it’s not even light yet? At least it was an opportunity for a study in yellow and blue.
I have never seen snow falling anywhere as early in a year as 17th October, but Iceland lived up to its name this morning and duly delivered, as my first flight home returned me to Keflavik. This seems even to have caught Icelanders unaware, seeing as it caused my second flight to be delayed two hours while we waited, seemingly endlessly, for the wings of our aircraft to be de-iced (“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking…. We are eighth in the queue for de-icing…. [45 minutes later] We are sixth in the queue….”). But I did get home in the end.
A trip out of the city. The suburb of King City is not as hick as this picture may make it appear, but I like this shot because it makes it seem like one of those tiny North American places with ridiculously grandiose names. You can almost see the weatherbeaten sign at the city limits: “KING CITY, ONTARIO (population: 47)”.
Being 42 