And still it rains, seemingly without end. The water race at the end of the old millpond in the woods is only rarely filled, and when it is it’s a sign we are once again in the ‘cross fingers and hope’ approach to flood defence. But the town stayed above water — today at least.
Umbra in Latin means ‘shade’, a sign that the umbrella was originally designed to protect against the sun. But this was not the application required in Hebden Bridge this afternoon. I believe this outrage against good weather can officially be termed ‘Storm Dudley’.
I haven’t had three days in a row of Manchester pictures since February 2020 — what happened after that, I wonder. But today’s the latest burst of two-in-a-row, and with good light to boot. Manchester’s Chinatown is, in no way comparable to, say, San Francisco’s in scale (not to mention anywhere in China) but in European terms it’s sizeable enough. At this point it is possible to imagine one is far away.
There have been a few of these down the years. If the owner — or the parent of the owner — wants to retrieve it, it’s up in Nutclough Woods, near the water race. Though it’s always puzzled me how someone can just lose one boot or shoe, at least, when one is out and about.
Asserting the “Right to Repair” electronic items is in the news (at least, the sort of news that I read); but largely it’s still cheaper to buy another one. We call places like this “recycling centres” these days but one has to wonder just how many of these items do, in the end, get reused.
The endless building and rebuilding of Manchester does not seem to have particularly slowed down as a result of the last two years of bollocks, although seeing as no one has any money any more except Mark Zuckerberg it seems, I don’t know who’s going to inhabit all these new buildings. This scaffold tunnel rises over my walking route to work and I’ve been passing through it in both directions for some months, thinking it would make a decent picture; this evening it gets its chance.
It’s 2/2/22, and also Lunar New Year (or Chinese New Year, Tet, whatever other term you want to use). It seemed appropriate to depict this today even if I suspect I am a day late. Manchester has a large Chinese population (students or otherwise) and the city centre is decorated accordingly. I believe I should say at this point: xīn nián kuài lè .
Evening on Hebden Bridge station, platform 1. But am I leaving town, or coming back? That’s for me to know. Perhaps it is all the same thing in the end.
I return here to a theme developed on Friday, but bear with me, it’s not an exciting time. Here we see the cones shamelessly deployed to ensure Sgt Cawood of Happy Valley always gets a parking space outside her house. I did wonder if they needed an extra for the role of “man with long coat and Brighton & Hove Albion shopping bag” but I don’t think that would have fitted the Yorkshire ambience, necessarily.
The Sunday market in Hebden Bridge is a significant contributor to the fact that Sundays are probably the busiest day in town, at least, when it’s not raining. There are some varied combinations possible — like here, Italian food and the dog-related stall next door to one another.
