Fourth and final day of the ALT-C conference, but the picture is not of Manchester today: this is Hebden Bridge station, as you probably recognise by now. An early morning after a late return the night before. Ow.
This is one of my town’s more pleasurable regular events and was thankfully blessed by good weather. I no longer have an interest in cars as a means of propulsion but any one built before about 1965 just has such a damn fine look to it. And when they come out to events like this they’re all looking their best, polished and chrome and curvy and well, dammit (Janet), rather sexy. But I only look. I don’t want a relationship with one of these things again. Too complicated.
(PS technically this is a self-portrait: look carefully.)
Hebden Bridge, and the British summer, and I have had a bit of a falling out over the last few weeks. It kind of started around June 21st and has gone on from there. Today, we all started toward a reconciliation of sorts. Let’s hope it continues.
On a pleasant summer’s day, here is the Nutclough stream, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in its flow. (It probably wouldn’t.) This is the stream that turned into a torrent on 9th July and took out a couple of houses two hundred yards downstream. More before and after comparison pictures are on the Facebook album, as linked.
Here is not the place for the fine detail, but the ‘significant’ news that hit on my first day in Tuscaloosa, mentioned below, was that the giant ‘pubco’ (pub ownership company) that owns the Railway has decided that it is unwilling to stump up the cost of a refurbishment following the damage caused by the floods on 22nd/23rd June and 9th July. They want to sell the pub, but no one is particularly convinced that they have an interest in keeping the pub in the hands of someone who will, well, keep it as a pub and not convert it into something else. The last few years in the UK have, to say the least, not been kind to the pub trade.
Well, we – the customers – want to keep it as a pub, so today we had a meeting there to discuss what we were going to do. It was a lovely sunny day and there was also a social aspect to it – no one wanted their last drink here to be that horrible 22nd June. But it shouldn’t have to be the last today, either. We’ll try not to make it the last.
This is the worst thing I have had to post about on this blog.
Until 1.15pm today had been a very uneventful day. It then started raining: hard. Very, very hard.
By 2.15pm the road on which I live had become a river, and then we saw that the lane which goes into the woods was pouring out water (and stones). Whether it was just rainwater or whether, as some speculated, the old reservoir at the top of the woods had burst its banks, the normally placid mill stream turned into a torrent. Where it goes under the main Keighley Road and through a sluice pipe into the river, this backed up against the retaining wall to an astonishing degree, rising literally 15 feet in half an hour and eventually pouring through the gardens of the two houses nearest the bridge.
The owners of the house were not in. Myself and other neighbours tried to save vital items and – most importantly – the two dogs (which you have seen before on this blog). But most of the ground floors were taken out. Our house is uphill from the stream, so was fine (a couple of idiot drivers ploughing through the stream at 30mph being the main threat).
More photos and footage can be seen on YouTube and Facebook for those into their weather porn. For comparison, the lake you see in the woods at a couple of points is where we played mölkky the other day.
I’m supposed to be going to New Orleans tomorrow, by the way – but I ain’t promising anything. At the moment, Hebden Bridge is impassable to cars.
Sorry to go on about the bloody weather but today was the first day in two weeks which really deserved the adjectives ‘warm’ and ‘sunny’ – and even then it still rained quite severely in the evening, with two heavy thunderstorms. It may flood again tomorrow. Meanwhile, here are some flowers, proving that given enough water (ha ha) life can flourish everywhere, including in the centre of this thirty-feet-high retaining wall at the side of the Keighley Road.
The last time the sun was seen in these parts was at some point on Wednesday 20th June, two weeks ago. It reappeared today for a couple of hours in the evening, creating a paroxysm of photography in this blogger, even if the shots were largely mundane, it was just a relief to see the light. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. As I post we’ve just been hit by a pretty intense storm. You gotta love it.
This was supposed to happen last weekend. Once a year the populace of Hebden Bridge spend a little while building ephemeral but beautiful costumes and parade down the town to the park. It’s like Carnival in Rio, but shorter, with less naked flesh and in Yorkshire. A lot of fun though. Today it became something of a two-finger-salute to the weather, which for the entire month of June (except maybe for 3 days around the 18th) has been dreadful. Market Street – the main road through the centre of Hebden – has been devastated, with maybe two or three businesses out of about 30 still open, or likely to reopen before September. And it was still raining today – in bursts, but they were heavy bursts.
I took 89 photos of the parade within the 17 minutes it took to pass me; so to pick just one was very difficult. That being the case, interested parties could look at the top 20 pics, on my Facebook site. But I pick this one for here mainly because of the happy smile of the central model and the fact that this was the only picture of all the ones I took which I felt worked despite the fact there was a spectator firmly in the background. For some reason, it just seems to work with him there. We were all in it together, so to speak. And for just a short time we forgot the floods and the rain and just enjoyed the spectacle.
Between about 10pm last night and 4am this morning Hebden Bridge town centre was under about 2 feet of water. (As you can see from many other pictures on this site we live 50 or so feet above the valley floor: luckily.) It drained quickly, and by the time I got down there at 10am, the flood water had gone. So no pictures of that.
But the damage had been done. At least half the businesses in the town centre were not open today and some might be closed for two weeks or more, a great dent in income in a time of diminished revenue as it is. The fire service were doing wonders, working all day to pump out cellars and basements. But although it did rain a lot yesterday, let’s also consider that most of the drains in this town are regularly blocked by dirt, leaves and debris because the Council don’t clean them: and we supposedly have a rather expensive flood defence system installed two miles up the valley (built after the last big flood in 2000) – which, for reasons no one is very clear about yet (was it not activated? Or simply inadequate despite the money spent?) – has failed. People couldn’t get hold of sandbags to protect their property. It’s the people, the businesses, of Hebden Bridge who will be picking up the costs of these mistakes.
Being 42 