A second day in a row spent in Manchester in which I didn’t seem to point my camera at any people, particularly. I like the collage effect here though, and the flash of reflected sunshine. After two long days though, I’m glad it’s the weekend.
In 2025, Bradford will become the UK’s City of Culture, and the sign proclaims this: from the rear, the slope on the left is one of the 2s, with the zero to the other side. Behind, a small part of the gigantic, desperate building site that constitutes most of its city centre at the present time. The bus station is entirely closed, having been declared unsafe a while back. You can’t get a taxi from anywhere particularly near the railway station. And all this with exactly eleven weeks to go until 1st January. City of Culture? Perhaps this chaos and neglect is, indeed, representative of the UK in this epoch.
What is this for, really? Surely if you want people to ‘drive normally’ up Oxford Road into Manchester city centre putting up a sign suggesting that they do so is exactly the way not to achieve this? “Hmmm, I thought I was driving normally, but… now I’m confused, what do they mean….” (screech of brakes as the now-distracted driver drifts to the side and takes out the Deliveroo guy).
Did nothing except trug into campus by the usual routes, do my thing, and trug home again. The usual routes take me through Chinatown, of which Manchester has a large example, the third biggest in Europe if you believe the hype. And I do — it is hard not to, bearing in mind the ethnic composition of my classes at the present time.
Back home: from Berlin on a Sunday morning to Hebden Bridge on a Monday one. At least I got out of the house today. This is a standard shot but the comparative lack of traffic was appealing. The sign to top left, less so, but I tried to make it look less obtrusive.
Amongst various (acknowledged) perks of my job I get to visit some world-renowned seats of learning, and the Humboldt University of Berlin is definitely one of the elite. Scholars who have worked here include Einstein, Schopenhauer, Marx, Weber, Hegel, Planck and von Braun, and if you haven’t heard of at least three of those, you need to do some more reading.
There is something terribly autumnal about this shot, even if it was 25ºC and extremely pleasant in Berlin today. But here we are, mid-to-late September, and I suppose it’s an inevitability.
Oh, the dog knows. Probably it already knows more details about the guy’s fish than he does, in, like, two seconds.
This is the second time the River Tyne has been depicted on this blog, but the first time I saw it, it was considerably smaller: this was on my walk up Burnhope Seat in 2020, where I passed the farm of ‘Tynehead’ at the other end of the river. By Newcastle the Tyne has grown fat, big enough to have what is, reputedly, the largest wooden construction in Europe built out in the middle of it — Dunston Staiths, a former coalport. And there it is. I like the lamp-posts on this one, too.
Another picture of someone sitting down, though she looks a little more comfortable than yesterday’s model (and has both her shoes on). Meanwhile, over on the other side of the bridge, there are interventions taking place in the ongoing duck-pigeon conflict,
The Thursday market is the place to come in Hebden Bridge for fish, vegetables, food of all kinds, and I certainly indulged today. Was it warm? No — autumn is in the post, I feel, but that’s why we stock up with food at this time of year.
Being 42 