I have been thinking about this, and have decided to declare this the one and only positive outcome of lockdown –‘this’ being the emergence of a UK pavement café culture. We don’t necessarily have the weather for it, but hey, pubs and restaurants can invest in some umbrellas, as they do elsewhere. On sunny afternoons like this one, it doesn’t matter, and we can give it a shot.
An innovative approach to keeping oneself, one’s beer and one’s smoking materials free from moisture. The weather could not decide what to do this afternoon.
The square reflected in the roundel, these posts standing outside the Shoulder of Mutton pub, happily reopened, after not just the c*r***v**** crap but the floods of Feb 9th as well. You see, we need economic activity here. Which is why this new ‘local lockdown’ has had no discernible effect at all.
This is a kind-of self-portrait: look closely enough into the mirror and I’m there in the background.
It is five years to the day since I took probably my favourite picture of this blog, and certainly the one I worked hardest to get — the one of the summit of Kilimanjaro. In 2020, such expeditions have become pipe dreams, although being fair about it, there have just been nine pictures in a row that were not taken on home turf. But I am back here in Hebden Bridge for a few days at least, and there’s work to get back to. Here, there at least remain toyshop owners with a sense of wry humour.
I too was having a day doing things around the house, but definitely do not share this guy’s head for heights.
The message on the one side is clear enough — but the bin? More proof that others are starting to lose it thanks to lockdown? Or perhaps they have always been the same.
The scarecrow itself is long gone. But its boots remain, like a sort of imprint, or memory. I doubt they’ll scare the birds off much. But then again, nor do scarecrows, particularly.
Over the last 3,235 days of this attempt to document the rest of my life in pictures there have, of course, been plenty of days where I’ve just stayed at home and not really done much. But there hasn’t been such a concentrated run of such days, day after day after day where there is nothing happening outside. And on a day when it never stopped raining…. this swell of smoke, a bonfire presumably, really was about the most interesting thing seen all day (with apologies to the family).
By the end of this month we may have been able to visit a pub and go away for a few days. If you think either of these things is a bad thing… let’s just say I disagree with you.
We are all starting to lose it. Why is he photographing this puddle? More to the point, why am I photographing him photographing this puddle? Which one of us is losing it more?
The sign is the added touch that will roughly date this scene for ever more.
This being a British summer, the balmy heat of Wednesday and Thursday has gone, and it’s raining again. It will do this until it feels like being different.
Old Town sits on the hills to the north of Hebden Bridge. In Christopher Saxton’s atlas of 1579, the first atlas of England and Wales ever published, it’s called The Old towne…. so it’s been around for a while.
Being 42 