Another grim day of weather, describable, at one level, as ‘sunshine and showers’, but the sunshine was brief and brought no succour, while the showers were prolonged and heavy. Here, they coincide, but I was still getting very wet.
Not an eventful day at all. I am hiding at home doing my best to get ready for things opening at uni in a couple of weeks’ time. Like these guys, but just on a bigger scale. The Nightjar bar sits below the Picture House and is one of those places that serves a dozen beers, all of them over-hopped and fruity, which is why these guys have beards.
Two days of total indolence are in progress for me, this being the first. I avoided the temptation to present a photo of this afternoon’s football result (Brighton & Hove Albion 3, Manchester United 2 — oh yes oh yes) and so this one will do. The woman in beige maybe regrets encouraging the geese to visit her for a snack.
So ends June, probably the warmest, sunniest month to yet feature on this blog, at least in the UK. The Hebden Bridge Arts Festival is underway, which doubtless explains this collage visible on Market Street — it’s the kind of thing that happens. Better than plastic bags hanging from the foliage, anyway.
With no running water on our allotment we depend for irrigation there either on rain or on lugging up liquid from the house. The buckets are waiting… but the rain has not come. So the bottles go up the hill, again and again.
A double meaning in the title of today’s post. The good weather continues, that’s the first thing. But it’s also a time in which I am sticking around familiar places for a good long spell. There has always been a steady drip-feed of new locations on the blog. The only previous sustained period without them was spring 2016, broken when we went to Portugal that summer. Football matches in obscure places have kept up the run of new locations in 2017-18 too. But since the season finished at Poulton on May 19th (the last new location) every shot has been from somewhere familiar and this is going to stay the case until well into August.
Still, in such lovely weather — familiarity definitely does not breed contempt. It’s nice to be here.
The annual Blue Pig Father’s Day race at the Blue Pig pub. Build a vessel of some kind that travels on water, make it look like a blue pig, chuck it off the bridge into the river and the first one over the weir wins. Thanks to a disastrous start (I feel I had better voluntarily resign as starter of our boat next year) we finished a comfortable last. The one with the kid’s face taped on the front was the winner. What this says, I have no idea.
This is the retaining wall for Keighley Road and some thirty feet high at this point, so this foxglove is a tenacious little bugger. They’re good at getting into crevices, I have noticed: various walls sprout them at the moment like purple nose hairs. Not a romantic simile I know but what the hell.
A wholly uneventful weekend. These were not even my cocktails.
A year ago today I was in Siberia and Britain was having its latest inconclusive and pointless electoral spasm. But early June 2018 is a highly uneventful time. With a cloudy day spent working at home I came as close as I have in any of these last 2,479 days to having nothing to photograph, and that’s eventually how this blog will end: there simply will be nothing more to say. Maybe this one doesn’t say much… but it is, at least, something.
Being 42 