A holiday weekend — no work tomorrow! (Unless of course you work in one of the many professions in which this idea of a mandated holiday is just a pipe dream.) But it was an excuse to go out and enjoy company and dress in silly yellow hats, if that’s your bag.
This scene is very Dutch, even without sight of any canals, windmills, cheese, cannabis retailers and so on — all of which Wageningen has, I can assure you. There are plenty of bikes visible here however. Conversations in the pub this evening suggest that the Nethlerlands faces just the same problems that are familiar at home right now, such as rising energy bills, neoliberalist shite in power, etc., and I sympathise, belive me. But all the same it seems just such a civilised place, compared to almost anywhere else I can think of.
Barking is one of the least gentrified bits of London, not that that is a bad thing. It also gives extremely good graveyard, as I discovered when getting away from the traffic noise and finding myself in the huge necropolis that is Rippleside cemetery, seeming to stretch away for miles, a vast city of memorials to those who have ‘passed on’ and ‘fallen asleep’. Or, here with the three members of the Sanderson family, taken out by (I assume) German bombers one night in January 1941.
A day at home, between trips away, and watching the beer get delivered to the pub (from across the road, for some reason) was the day’s chief entertainment. Diamond the dog becomes the latest animal to make theblog twice, adopting much the same position as on her first appearance.
The media would like us to think that all is heading for some kind of climate-related disaster, but personally I’m quite enjoying the decent weather this summer, which seems to have extended out to Northern Ireland, at least this week. And she is having a good time in it too.
Hey, I’m on holiday. Still in my own country — just about. But Derry, Northern Ireland, is the westernmost city in the UK and doesn’t really feel like the rest of the place for lots of different reasons. Of which more in tomorrow’s post. The Peace Bridge crosses the River Foyle, which is, essentially, the border between the UK and the Republic of Ireland — only not quite, at this point. It’s that uncertainty which defines this place, it seems to me.
An estate agent might still describe this a “Manchester city centre apartment, including private balcony, with intimate views of the River Medlock below”. The reality is that this building has been swathed in scaffolding for months now (certainly since at least early February, as this pic proves), and the Medlock is a litter-speckled concrete drainage channel at this point. I doubt those stairs have much purpose in existence, either.
At about 3.30am in the morning I was awoken by a distant but continuously ringing alarm down in town, and a sense that I could smell smoke, although both these things only reached the semi-concscious level of awareness. Having convinced myself that if there was smoke, it was external to our place, I drifted back to sleep.
In the morning, it became more apparent where all this was coming from: the La Perla restaurant in town burned down overnight. This morning they were still dousing the smouldering timbers, the town cordoned off as I walked past on my way to the station — so this was the nearest I could get for this bit of reportage. No one was hurt, but I imagine there are a number of people who today are extremely upset.
The ‘West Riding’ bar on Dewsbury station ranks up there with the world’s great railway station refreshment rooms. It’s quite as good as Stalybridge’s, and that’s high praise indeed. The random scattering of stuff around it, inside and out, seems natural rather than the affectations of an interior designer. It’s been a while since this piano made any music, but it remains interesting in different ways.
Being 42 