You saw Whitelocks not so long ago but, well, here it is again. The channellng of the sun down the alley to hit the blonde hair was too nice to resist. This was the prelude to a long weekend away, which I’ve just returned from, so there’s some catching up to do.
Another little corner of town. No symbolic intent, I just like the aesthetics of the shot. This has been the most Hebden Bridge-bound passage of the blog, since mid-June. However, I’ve finished the first draft of the book, am having two weeks off and travelling a great deal more over the next month. So perhaps the arrow does have a symbolic meaning after all.
This demolition site — old industrial premises — in the centre of town has been close to getting on the blog for a couple of weeks now, today it’s made it. Seems a bit strange to be sweeping up at the start of the working day, but I’m just a sedentary intellectual type, what do I know.
What makes this post somewhat exceptional in the general scheme of things is not so much its aesthetics but the time of its taking. I mean…. on a Sunday? And this place was packed at that time. We’d gone down to offload a bunch of Joe’s old toys, but nearly couldn’t get a plot despite getting up at 4.45am and arriving there an hour later at most. And at 6am people were turning up demanding to know whether we had any PS3 games. Blimey. Free-market capitalism, eh. I guess it works at this local scale.
The new Championship season kicked off. for me, Joe and about 33,400 other people, at Elland Road this afternoon. I enjoyed the first 15 minutes or so.
L. S. Lowry painted a famous picture in the 1930s called ‘Going to the Match’, showing people flocking to Bolton Wanderers’ ground amid a sea of cobbles, factories and back-to-back housing. There aren’t many grounds left where you can still get that kind of vibe 80 years later, but Elland Road is one of them.
It’s been raining again. Perhaps it’s not a blip, maybe that’s the end of the whole hot weather thing. Still, we’ve all got to get out of the house when we can. You didn’t want a photo of my laptop now, did you.
If I’m to keep this blog going, and non-repetitive, I will have to keep finding new slants on the familiar territory of my home town. Particularly at the moment, where I am spending days on end just sat in my office at home, writing the first draft of the book. So here we go, one of the town’s stranger buildings I think. For some reason this shot looks like it might be taken in the USA, the architecture just has that look to it, I can almost see old trams running down the street too (as they used to, a century ago). Here, for once, I don’t think the phone wires detract from the shot.
I have been trying to prevent repetition on this blog but today cannot avoid it. After a fairly ordinary day, a terrific rainstorm makes yesterday’s picture seem like a portent. Showing how well they have learned the lessons since last year’s flooding, blocked drains and manic car drivers turn a heavy, but otherwise manageable thunderstorm into a near-flooding. Poor drainage has hit the cellar of the Railway again and yet it’s all so bloody avoidable.
Back from the red brick of Crowborough, built on its clay soils, to the light brown stone of Hebden Bridge, built on its millstone grit. But the weather was more or less the same – unsettled, rumbly, turbulent. Not a bad shot but shame about the telephone wire. And the time on the clock is fiction — this is a notoriously inaccurate timepiece.
Once in a while you will get a photo on here that is posted not for artistic merit (though I don’t mind this shot in that regard, I think it captures the small and prosaic nature of this establishment), but just because it means something to me. This trip to Sussex has been undertaken partly because I wanted to go and have a nose around the places where I lived when I was a child, until 1988 when I left aged about 19, these being the town of Crowborough in Sussex and the nearby village of Rotherfield. I could bore you with how it all felt but there’s not a lot of point, you’ve never been there and it’s not, to tell the truth, the most exciting part of the world although it is a very pretty one.
The reason this photo is here is because of all the places I expected to have disappeared, this was the most unexpected survivor; my old neighbourhood store. Seeing this place and going in to buy sweets (and I did, well, a Bounty Bar anyway) really did make me feel like I was 10 years old again. It’s not called ‘Mace’ any more but long may it last.
