Beautiful morning today but a bloody cold one, with a sharp frost, clearly visible here. Well, that’s winter on the way then.
Slight reservations about posting this if only because there’ve been a lot of Hebden Bridge pictures this last few days. Off to Russia on Sunday however, to give this blog renewed international flavour.
A day swamped with bad vibes but by the end I had found out the probable cause. Not a pleasant thing at all but not something which affected me directly. At that point I was glad I was able to join friends down at the pub.
I must have come through this back door at least twice a week on average for the last ten years but it’s nice to see it with a fresh eye now and again.
The light was weird this morning – a burst of sunshine into a day that was otherwise pretty foul – so here’s a challenge: can it make even an industrial skip, full of waste, look photogenic?
Hell yeah. It can.
Today was proving a very mundane day photographically and I was struggling to find a representative picture – until the natural environment obliged with the last light of the day.
Tomorrow is the 50th day of this blog, by the way. So look out for the page of ‘outtakes’ (or ‘best of the rest’) which I’m going to stick up tomorrow alongside the daily picture.
The Indian Summer buggered off back to India at least a week ago and since then it’s barely stopped raining. Not much else worth adding here, except perhaps, ‘enough already’.
A bit blurred I know but this was the best picture I came up with to encapsulate what was another rainy day. Apparently Manchester is not, according to its reputation, the rainiest city in the UK (it’s Glasgow, I believe) – but on days like this it certainly feels like it.
Incidentally, is it me or do Caffé Nero spell their name wrong?
35,000 people marched in Manchester yesterday against the policies of the government. PM David Cameron said, bluntly, in the Manchester Evening News today: ‘You are all wrong’. This presumably means, he thinks he is right.
OK, let us look at just one salient story for a moment. On 14th March 2007, the incumbent Labour-led government voted on whether or not to spend at least (that’s ‘at least’ – it will inevitably rise) £20billion on upgrading the UK’s Trident nuclear missile system: something that has never been used, and probably never will be. At this point the government’s majority was 62. 85 Labour MPs voted against the plan. Therefore, had the Opposition done what it does as a matter of course with most other votes, and opposed it, it would not have gone through, and that £20bn would not now be on the public spending bill.
However, virtually every Tory MP voted for the proposal. This £20bn of public spending (no mention of public-private partnerships here) has been specifically said by Mr Cameron to be ‘ring fenced’ and not open to being cut.
All this is fact, a matter of public record. Therefore, the only conclusion to draw is that the Conservative party, and the Liberal Democrats who are the pimps in this particular transaction, are actually not all that interested in cutting government spending per se. Rather, it shows that they are far keener to redirect money which could go on education, welfare, health and other things that citizens might actually directly benefit from, and spend it on bombs.
And I bet the citizens of Manchester are paying to police the party conference, too: despite facing local government public spending cuts as big as any in the country. Paying for the privilege of having a chunk of their city centre turned into a fortress. Inclusive government? Democracy? Yeah, we’ve heard of it. Christ, I’m pissed off.
I like travelling; but I also like coming home. It’s a cliché, but one that is true, particularly on a beautiful, Indian summer’s day like today.
I had another very close candidate for today’s photo, on a similar theme, which I have put on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/drew_whitworth/6200384161/in/photostream. Like everyone else, I think Indian summers are great – that last little bit of heat and sun before the inevitability of winter. No wonder we all chill out.
There’s the kind of graffiti that does deface and spoil but a lot of it can be a great improvement over what’s already there (and let’s face it, the corporate sector happily deface our public spaces with advertising, most of which is inane crap).
These messages are painted on an otherwise dank and dark underbridge near Lancaster station. There’s such a story here, one that we’ll probably never know.
[UPDATE: Only a couple of months later did I find out that the main message (discounting the one bottom left) is actually lyrics from the song Chasing Cars by the band Snow Patrol. And there was me thinking we’d found a budding poet. Still, it remains an interesting message.]
Alternate Sundays a market sets up in the centre of Hebden Bridge, five minutes’ walk from my house. This stall is always there with its amazing profusion of pots, packets, jars, bottles and bags of great Mediterranean food, all presided over by this otherwise cliched Yorkshireman. No picture snatched in passing can capture it, but there’s enough in this picture to make the glands begin watering anyway.
