This little graveyard perches on the hillside, across the valley from my house. With a powerful enough pair of binoculars, it might even be possible to see this diorama from our bedroom window. But until today, it had gone unseen. There’s nothing else to do but explore these nearby hidden corners.
In fact, this is so dismembered I’m not even sure it is, or used to be, an umbrella. But never mind. It makes a difference from depicting the dead city of Manchester more generally. And does reflect what was a quite windy day.
I had candidates for today that were better pictures, maybe, but I really wanted to see people’s faces today. And no, I don’t mean masked ones.
Ten full days have passed without a single human appearing on this blog, in any form. Here are two — one frozen in time, idealised, commercialised. The other mobile, but faceless, distant, dehumanised. I can interact with neither. And the trouble is, I’m not evern sure what is better, any more.
The establishment in question is located somewhere round here but that sign isn’t pointing to it. Instead it just presides over a mostly empty car park, where there should be signs of visitors, shoppers, people just hanging out in the town centre on a Saturday.
One of the lies we’ve been sold over the last year centres around the notion of ‘essentia’ and ‘non-essential’ retail. Amazon can compel their drones to go work in warehouses that are centres of virus transmission, but I am not allowed to patronise a local bookshop, nor to buy a pair of shoes. This has been an unparalleled opportunity to shaft small businesses, one the Tories (backed up by Labour, who are even worse) have taken with glee, while puttng on their concerned face, and telling us it’s all for our own good. Not if you are a business owner, I imagine. But that’s OK, we can just blame them for ‘not adapting’, like not inventing a way to get nails done online. Sorry to break out into this again, but there’ll be weeks more of this crap yet.
So I was just passing through Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool, today, and passed these gates to the Salvation Army children’s home of Strawberry Field. Around the corner, on Menlove Lane, grew up a certain John Lennon, who used to enjoy the annual Sally Army parties, where the brass bands played and he would play in the garden. In 1966 he began tossing around some ideas for a psychedlic pop epic about these memories — and the rest, you probably know. The original building was demolished in the 1970s, but it still functions as a visitor centre and, as you can see, attracts the occasional pilgrim.
So exciting was yesterday that it slipped my mind that it was the day on which this record was confirmed — this is now the longest run of English-only pictures on this blog. As of today it is 144 days since day 3,312, when Scotland (in the form of Loch Skeen) featured for the day. That, and the one from about 100 yards into Wales on 24/6/20, are all that I have taken outside England in over a year. This is not the life I was leading up to that point; make your own judgments as to whether it’s a better or worse thing for all concerned, but it at least illustrates the impact of all the present crap. (And it is crap. This is not a political point.)
Also, in West Yorkshire anyway, it’s still snowing.
I did leave Hebden Bridge today, as Clare became the first person under 70 years of age that I know has been vaccinated (it wasn’t against mumps, if you take my meaning). But the pictures taken during my half hour wait in the car park at the hospital in Halifax were not very exciting. Nor is the one above, of course, but it at least continues the recent snowy theme. Vaccinations notwithstanding it seems like there will be weeks more of this yet. Some lights are still on, here and there.
A year has passed since there was a shot taken outside the UK (it was in Bucharest on 2/2/20) and in that time only two of them have been taken outside England. Without going through the stats in detail, it’s probably twenty years since I last spend this amount of uninterrupted time on this island. Am I bothered about this? Not for myself, I’ve decided, but I am when I think about what this change represents. Even going into Manchester seems to risk being subversive these days. These two guys were a welcome flash of hi-vis humanity this morning.
It’s just some graffiti on the old pumping station up in the woods above my house. But wouldn’t it be nice if this really were some portal into another world. One where the pubs were open, would be a real good start.
Being 42 