It is actually easy to get this shot, if one is up before dawn and walking along Commercial Street in HB. However, it is chosen today to epitomise the fact that I do still have early mornings now and again. The sabbatical largely cured me of this affliction, but not entirely. This is the earliest shot since Abu Dhabi airport on 27th May, and the sixth-earliest ever on the blog.
You have seen this scene before on the blog (like here, for example), but despite my desire to avoid repetition, it’s a frequently passed view and hard to resist it sometimes. Look to the east as you pass over the canal bridge near Hebden Bridge railway station — you’ll see it.
This will be a long run of pictures from only Hebden Bridge and Manchester. These will continue to be rich seams for photography as long as the light is right, which it certainly was today. And the other astonishing, perhaps even unrepeatable feature of this shot is that there is NO TRAFFIC. Just for a moment.
Despite spending several hours in Wigan today, a location that has yet to make its debut on this blog, any shots that might have arisen from there had already been trumped by this morning’s opportunities at home, proof that just about anything can turn into a decent photo as long as the light is right. And boy, this morning, was it right.
A definite ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ day and also ‘thank God I was not commuting into Manchester’ after the last two days (I won’t bore you with the details). Those working in Calrec Audio as dusk fell this Friday may or may not have felt their own version of the same emotions.
A pleasant, relaxing Sunday, with everyone toking their caffeine and generally chilling out. Everyone should have a day like this at least once a week.
The half-timbered structure in the rear is Sinclair’s Oyster Bar, probably the oldest extant pub in the city of Manchester, even if it has moved a couple of times. The lights in the foreground are reflected in the perspex fencing that keeps the Mitre Bar — where we were — from its more venerable and also cheaper rival.
Stavanger is the fourth-biggest city in Norway (and the first three have also featured on this blog at some point — Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim, in that order). It is the home of the Norwegian oil industry, and totally dominated by it — the university has a big mock oil rig right in the centre of the campus, and I bet you anyone you talk to in a bar or at the airport (unless it happens to be me) will be working on some petroleum-related task. This picture is taken over the pool of Breivatnet, which prettifies the city centre. And another thing you can tell from this picture — it’s nearly winter…
Coat and thermos flask notwithstanding, the fact one can be doing this in Manchester in mid-November is a sign that we continue to have plenty of mild weather. The more insane newspapers in the UK seem convinced that the storm that has hit the Philippines will somehow leap two oceans and half a world and, specifically, hit middle-class districts of the UK in the next few days, but there’s no evidence of this. (There never is very much evidence for anything included in the insane newspapers.)
My train was slightly late, but this one left just at the right time. I don’t know if this picture is quite what I expected to be when I took it, but it was always going to be today’s photo.
