Friday 6th November 2020, 2.30pm (day 3,361)
Now that’s a mackerel sky if ever there was one. A change in the weather is on the way…
Mackerel sky
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Category Archives: Hebden Bridge
Darkness falls
Wednesday 28th October 2020, 4.50pm (day 3,352)
I’ve given up wondering whether I’m being metaphorical or not. Fact is it’s that first week after the clocks go back, and dusk oppresses us an hour or more earlier than it did last week. Winter is coming. The Christmas lights are ready.
Crown Street, Tuesday morning
Tuesday 27th October 2020, 8.25am (day 3,351)
The schools are shut for half-term, there are no trains to Manchester and it rained most of the day. Hebden Bridge is back in lockdown almost by default. It’s a depressing time, a silence hangs over the place that is unnatural and wrong.
View to the hills
Friday 23rd October 2020, 3.45pm (day 3,347)
With no disrespect to the people who are sharing this life with me (Clare, Joe), things have a drabness to them at the moment: all the diary contains are work events, there is nothing communal beyond some football matches (and even they are visited alone), no parties, no gigs. This is what the world has become now the Great Fear has been used as an excuse to kick us all into a digital semi-prison. If things are different where you are, then embrace that. At least from my house the view is quite good, particularly when the afternoon sunlight catches the hills in the distance.
Royd Terrace stays in touch
Monday 19th October 2020, 11.50am (day 3,343)
Whether or not Authority spasms and throws out arbitrary diktats in the next few weeks will not change the fact that I have plenty of work to do, and opportunities to get out of Hebden Bridge are going to be limited. So, Johnson, Our Glorious Leader, do your worst, I don’t care any more. Expect more photos of the local area. I don’t know why I focused on this run of satellite dishes on the street of Royd Terrace this morning — possibilities range from a ‘staying in touch’ metaphor, up to and including the decline of civilisation itself. Perhaps.
Hammock smile
Sunday 18th October 2020, 2.00pm (day 3,342)
I don’t get to spend enough time in hammocks. There is something deeply relaxing about this mode of relaxation. A shame the weather is getting colder now and this one — lying outside the houses that stand above our allotment — probably won’t be used much now, until the spring. (Spring 2021 seems even longer away this year than usual, sadly.)
Mural (no longer heron)
Friday 16th October 2020, 1.30pm (day 3,340)
I quite like the heron mural that occupied this spot until fairly recently; now it has become this. Possibly this blog is now the only record of how it used to look. I do quite like its successor too, but this photo is more of all the various quadrilaterals on the side of what used to be the Hole in the Wall pub and has been ‘under refurbishment’ for what seems like years now.
Ghost Town
Monday 5th October 2020, 10.50pm (day 3,329)
Pubs now have to shut at 10pm, and so with no nightclubs or alternative venues available for anyone wanting to carry on with their evening, everyone now mills around and gets into taxis and buses at the same time, thus compressing all those infective agents together instead of spacing them out more. And if you think this idiocy will be repealed soon, recall that the licensing restrictions brought in during World War One remained in place for eighty years.
Meanwhile, your friendly local high street is becoming a ghost town; if your place looked much different from Hebden Bridge at 10.50pm this evening (or on any given evening), then I would say that’s unusual.
Sitting out in the rain
Wednesday 30th September 2020, 5.25pm (day 3,324)
A foul, miserable day of weather that matched the general mood. September sun has just about sustained the local pubs, but once it stops being very agreeable to sit outside — as it definitely was today — then they will slowly rot away and die, like most other things that bring fun into our lives, presently.
A metaphor, possibly
Monday 28th September 2020, 12.30pm (day 3,322)
This is a factual statement. The road past our house has been closed for weeks while some vague ‘improvements’ take place on the moors. But perhaps this shot is also metaphorical.
Either way I really hope the phallically-challenged moron who roared past this sign later at 60mph in his Porsche was actually heading for Keighley. To have seen his face.
Being 42 