Off we all go to our various duties and assignations, early on a Wednesday morning. And what was I doing in Wakefield Kirkgate station — a town that has never before featured on the blog (thus becoming named location #270) — at 7.40am? Well, you don’t get to see every aspect of my life on here.
Plans to minimise my time in Manchester while on sabbatical have not been successful this week (or next). The weather turned during the day, as well, and it was quite cool and rainy by the evening. A pleasant morning on HB station though: just the latest in a number of occasions where the arrangement of fellow passengers on the platform has interested me.
Blog-wise, it’s two months since I pulled duty on a 6.32 train out of Hebden Bridge — arrives Manchester about 7.10, like this morning, if it’s feeling energetic. The bloke in yellow is the owner of the fold-up bike on the other side of the shot: he looks the least keen of all of them, but then again he has his onward transport sorted.
The clock on my camera was set to 4.15am when I took this but I can’t remember whether this is before or after I adjusted it out of Emirates time when I changed planes in Abu Dhabi. Maybe it’s Gulf time and maybe it’s UK time and maybe we were somewhere over [insert Eastern European country of choice] at this point; either way the night was endless, timeless. This is only the blog’s third 4.nn am shot and the first two were both in its first year.
I will remain in Vietnam until Wednesday night but I have to work from this point on, so today, Monday, was the last of my three-day weekend of tourism. Shipping visitors out from Saigon and into the Mekong Delta is a major industry which I was happy to buy into for a day; in case you think there is something ‘authentic’ about this shot let me observe that the four people in the front of this boat are all Europeans of various types. Nevertheless this doesn’t reduce the attractiveness of the place, with its water the colour of milky tea and a general level of peacefulness here on the northern edge of the county of Ben Tre, 90 minutes’ drive south of the big city. Yes, I like Vietnam… highly recommended.
If you’ve been to Saigon you are surely aware that the dominant lifeform in the city is the motorcycle. There are hordes of them. They make crossing the road an act that takes definite courage and the permutations of humans and cargo that can fit on them beggars belief. I even saw one today with two people and a dog on it, I kid you not. I tried to get a shot of a horde in transit, but this one, of one of the many street-side motorcycle parks, seems also to sum up their sheer number quite well.
This is, of course, a quite different photo of platform 2 of Preston station than the one I took sixteen days ago: and I was heading in an entirely different direction — towards home instead of away from it. That’s my excuse anyway. No repetition!
Beautifully — some might even say, ridiculously — warm day today for February, with temperatures up to 20ºC in Hebden Bridge. It’s the half-term holidays as well as the weekend and all this tempted people out, including me, as the afternoon saw a decamp up to the in-laws’ place in Morecambe. Preston station was busy and well-lit; on such days it’s hard not to admire the durability and aesthetic qualities of your basic Victorian station architecture — love those pillars.
One of those shots where I took it — as one of several attempts to capture the nice morning light at Hebden Bridge station this morning — then thought no more about it. Only when it got uploaded onto the laptop did I notice the effect on this person’s head. Do they have bright pink hair? No, but there is a second red signal light on that side of the tracks.
Honestly, the street drainage in Manchester is appalling. It was wet this morning, but not that wet. But from the look of the streets it was as if some tropical storm had washed over.
Anyway, I don’t have to deal with the place so much in the next few months. The next time there’ll be even the chance to take two photos in a row from Manchester will be late March: after that, hopefully, September.
Being 42 